SWD-Net: A Benchmark Dataset for Small Water Body Detection from High-Resolution Imagery

Small and seasonal water bodies store a substantial portion of inland surface water and play a key role in local hydrology, ecosystem resilience, and agricultural sustainability. Yet their small size, irregular geometry, and frequent seasonal variability hinder accurate detection in global water products derived from coarse-resolution imagery. To address this limitation, we present SWD-Net, a high-resolution, expert-annotated benchmark dataset for small water-body detection from aerial and satellite imagery. SWD-Net consists of 10,085 image\u2013mask pairs (1,024 \u00d7 1,024 pixels) sourced primarily from NAIP, Google Earth, and LoveDA, spanning diverse climatic and land-cover conditions.