# SatUnreal: A High-Precision Synthetic Dataset for Satellite Stereo Matching via Unreal Engine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27442/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.

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

- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Semantic Stereo for Incidental Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08739/) (2018)
- [SkyScenes: A Synthetic Dataset for Aerial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06719/) (2023)
- [WHU-Stereo: A Challenging Benchmark for Stereo Matching of High-Resolution Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02342/) (2022)
- [SynRS3D: A Synthetic Dataset for Global 3D Semantic Understanding from Monocular Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18151/) (2024)
- [What Makes Good Synthetic Training Data for Zero-Shot Stereo Matching?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16930/) (2025)
- [Diachronic Stereo Matching for Multi-Date Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22808/) (2026)
- [UniTT-Stereo: Unified Training of Transformer for Enhanced Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02545/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D reconstruction from satellite imagery is essential for large-scale topographic analysis, yet the lack of high-fidelity training datasets with accurate occlusion labels remains a primary bottleneck. Existing benchmarks, such as US3D and WHU-Stereo, face inherent challenges in spatio-temporal mismatch -- environmental changes and shadow displacements between multi-view acquisitions -- and provide ambiguous ground truth in occluded regions due to LiDAR sparsity. In this paper, we propose SatUnreal, a high-precision synthetic dataset designed to fundamentally overcome these limitations through an Unreal Engine-based simulation pipeline. SatUnreal provides 10,000 stereo pairs with high resolution (0.3m GSD) and is characterized by: (1) Physical Geometry Simulation, replicating realistic satellite orbits by systematically varying baselines and azimuths; (2) Spatio-temporal Consistency, eliminating temporal noise through fixed virtual environments; (3) Topographic Diversity, spanning dense urban canyons to low-texture natural terrains; and (4) Mathematical Label Integrity, utilizing a novel two-step linetrace algorithm to generate flawless occlusion masks. Experimental results using SOTA iterative models demonstrate that models trained exclusively on SatUnreal achieve superior zero-shot transfer performance on real-world benchmarks (US3D, WHU-Stereo) compared to those trained on real datasets. Our findings prove that physically accurate synthetic data provides a more effective supervisory signal for learning geometric features than complex real-world observations, establishing a new paradigm for Sim-to-Real transfer in Earth Observation. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jmp-Telepix/SatUnreal_A_High-Precision_Synthetic_Dataset_for_Satellite_Stereo_Matching_via_UnrealEngine