mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RarePlanes: Synthetic Data Takes Flight

arXiv 2006.02963 ↗First posted 4 Jun 2020cs.CV cs.DBcited by 48

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

RarePlanes is a unique open-source machine learning dataset that incorporates both real and synthetically generated satellite imagery. The RarePlanes dataset specifically focuses on the value of synthetic data to aid computer vision algorithms in their ability to automatically detect aircraft and their attributes in satellite imagery. Although other synthetic/real combination datasets exist, RarePlanes is the largest openly-available very-high resolution dataset built to test the value of synthetic data from an overhead perspective. Previous research has shown that synthetic data can reduce the amount of real training data needed and potentially improve performance for many tasks in the computer vision domain. The real portion of the dataset consists of 253 Maxar WorldView-3 satellite scenes spanning 112 locations and 2,142 km^2 with 14,700 hand-annotated aircraft. The accompanying synthetic dataset is generated via AI.Reverie's simulation platform and features 50,000 synthetic satellite images simulating a total area of 9331.2 km^2 with ~630,000 aircraft annotations. Both the real and synthetically generated aircraft feature 10 fine grain attributes including: aircraft length, wingspan, wing-shape, wing-position, wingspan class, propulsion, number of engines, number of vertical-stabilizers, presence of canards, and aircraft role. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the real and synthetic datasets and compare performances. By doing so, we show the value of synthetic data for the task of detecting and classifying aircraft from an overhead perspective.

Key facts. Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2020.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 7; 2023: 6; 2024: 11; 2025: 11; 2026: 5.

48 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challengescited by 202
  2. 2021Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detectioncited by 132
  3. 2022MTU-Net: Multi-level TransUNet for Space-based Infrared Tiny Ship Detectioncited by 47
  4. 2023SyntheWorld: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Land Cover Mapping and Building Change Detectioncited by 19
  5. 2025Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectivescited by 18
  6. 2023SatDM: Synthesizing Realistic Satellite Image with Semantic Layout Conditioning using Diffusion Modelscited by 11
  7. 2024SynRS3D: A Synthetic Dataset for Global 3D Semantic Understanding from Monocular Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 9
  8. 2024Infrared Small Target Detection in Satellite Videos: A New Dataset and A Novel Recurrent Feature Refinement Frameworkcited by 9
  9. 2024Applications of Knowledge Distillation in Remote Sensing: A Surveycited by 8
  10. 2021SyntEO: Synthetic Data Set Generation for Earth Observation and Deep Learning -- Demonstrated for Offshore Wind Farm Detectioncited by 6
  11. 2024FOOL: Addressing the Downlink Bottleneck in Satellite Computing with Neural Feature Compressioncited by 6
  12. 2024Improving Object Detector Training on Synthetic Data by Starting With a Strong Baseline Methodologycited by 6
36 more
  1. 2021SIMPL: Generating Synthetic Overhead Imagery to Address Zero-shot and Few-Shot Detection Problemscited by 4
  2. 2023Whale Detection Enhancement through Synthetic Satellite Imagescited by 4
  3. 2025Enhancing Monocular Height Estimation via Sparse LiDAR-Guided Correctioncited by 4
  4. 2021Artificial and beneficial -- Exploiting artificial images for aerial vehicle detectioncited by 3
  5. 2023Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)cited by 3
  6. 2025Foundation Models for Remote Sensing: An Analysis of MLLMs for Object Localizationcited by 3
  7. 2021The MIS Check-Dam Dataset for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation Taskscited by 2
  8. 2022The Weaknesses of Adversarial Camouflage in Overhead Imagerycited by 2
  9. 2022Centerpoints Are All You Need in Overhead Imagerycited by 2
  10. 2022Towards a Taxonomy for the Use of Synthetic Data in Advanced Analyticscited by 2
  11. 2024SSTD: Stripe-Like Space Target Detection Using Single-Point Weak Supervisioncited by 2
  12. 2024Generating Synthetic Satellite Imagery for Rare Objects: An Empirical Comparison of Models and Metricscited by 2
  13. 2025Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approachescited by 2
  14. 2025SDQM: Synthetic Data Quality Metric for Object Detection Dataset Evaluationcited by 2
  15. 2022A benchmark dataset for deep learning-based airplane detection: HRPlanescited by 1
  16. 2022Meta-simulation for the Automated Design of Synthetic Overhead Imagerycited by 1
  17. 2022Multi-Spectral Image Classification with Ultra-Lean Complex-Valued Modelscited by 1
  18. 2024FlightScope: An Experimental Comparative Review of Aircraft Detection Algorithms in Satellite Imagerycited by 1
  19. 2024Using Game Engines and Machine Learning to Create Synthetic Satellite Imagery for a Tabletop Verification Exercisecited by 1
  20. 2025VFM-Guided Semi-Supervised Detection Transformer under Source-Free Constraints for Remote Sensing Object Detectioncited by 1
  21. 2025FOD-S2R: A FOD Dataset for Sim2Real Transfer Learning based Object Detectioncited by 1
  22. 2026SADGE: Structure and Appearance Domain Gap Estimation of Synthetic and Real Datacited by 1
  23. 2021LUAI Challenge 2021 on Learning to Understand Aerial Imagescited by 0
  24. 2021Machines & Influence: An Information Systems Lenscited by 0
  25. 2023ColMix -- A Simple Data Augmentation Framework to Improve Object Detector Performance and Robustness in Aerial Imagescited by 0
  26. 2023Impact of architecture on robustness and interpretability of multispectral deep neural networkscited by 0
  27. 2024SISP: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic Satellite Imagescited by 0
  28. 2024Improving Object Detection by Modifying Synthetic Data with Explainable AIcited by 0
  29. 2025Evaluation and Analysis of Deep Neural Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks on Modern Remote Sensing Datasetscited by 0
  30. 2025Differential Morphological Profile Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  31. 2025Synthetic Data for Robust Runway Detectioncited by 0
  32. 2025Gaussian Process Assisted Meta-learning for Image Classification and Object Detection Modelscited by 0
  33. 2026Focus on What Really Matters in Low-Altitude Governance: A Management-Centric Multi-Modal Benchmark with Implicitly Coordinated Vision-Language Reasoning Frameworkcited by 0
  34. 2026Rethinking Transfer Learning for Industrial Inspection: DINOv3 vs. ImageNet Pretraining Across RGB and X-ray Taskscited by 0
  35. 2026Diagnosing Aerial-View Object Detectors with Foundational Image Generative Modelscited by 0
  36. 2026VesselBench-800K: A Large-scale Perception Benchmark for Multimodal Vessel Detection, Counting, and Density Estimationcited by 0