# MESSI: A Multi-Elevation Semantic Segmentation Image Dataset of an Urban Environment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [The Multi-Temporal Urban Development SpaceNet Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04420/) (2021)
- [VDD: Varied Drone Dataset for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13608/) (2023)
- [openDD: A Large-Scale Roundabout Drone Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08463/) (2020)
- [Semantics through Time: Semi-supervised Segmentation of Aerial Videos with Iterative Label Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01910/) (2020)
- [Finding a Landing Site on an Urban Area: A Multi-Resolution Probabilistic Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12592/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SegFly: A Dataset and 2D-3D-2D Paradigm for Aerial RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17920/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a Multi-Elevation Semantic Segmentation Image (MESSI) dataset comprising 2525 images taken by a drone flying over dense urban environments. MESSI is unique in two main features. First, it contains images from various altitudes, allowing us to investigate the effect of depth on semantic segmentation. Second, it includes images taken from several different urban regions (at different altitudes). This is important since the variety covers the visual richness captured by a drone's 3D flight, performing horizontal and vertical maneuvers. MESSI contains images annotated with location, orientation, and the camera's intrinsic parameters and can be used to train a deep neural network for semantic segmentation or other applications of interest (e.g., localization, navigation, and tracking). This paper describes the dataset and provides annotation details. It also explains how semantic segmentation was performed using several neural network models and shows several relevant statistics. MESSI will be published in the public domain to serve as an evaluation benchmark for semantic segmentation using images captured by a drone or similar vehicle flying over a dense urban environment.