SMARS – A Simulated Multimodal Aerial Remote Sensing dataset

In order to cover different contexts, the dataset is modeled on the topography of two European cities: Paris and Venice, resulting in two pairs of scenes named as SParis and SVenice, respectively, with associated orthoimages and Digital Surface Models (DSMs). Changes were simulated between a pre- and a post-scenario, where the latter has an overall larger number of buildings and reduced green areas, with the additional simulation of some demolished buildings. In order to increase the resemblance to real data, the input images were further processed to orthophotos and digital elevation models by a conventional photogrammetric pipeline in order to include different illumination conditions and other effects, such as blurred building boundaries. Reference ground truth maps were directly rendered for the training and validation of change detection, building extraction and urban segmentation tasks. The data have been rendered at two different Ground Sampling Distances (GSD) of 30cm and 50cm. Examples of output images are shown in Fig. 1.

For SVenice (Fig. 3), 50% of the coverage is set as training as it contains a large area of water, belonging to the class "others" (V1, marked in blue), while 15% is used for validation (V2) and 35% (V3) for testing. The footprints of the images with a GSD of 50cm are larger with respect to the ones of 30cm, respectively 4500 x 3560 pixels (SParis) and 5600 x 5600 pixels (SVenice). For all datasets, the training, test and validation tiles at 30 cm GSD are subsets of the respective tiles at 50 cm GSD. In the case of SParis, the splitting boundaries of the 50cm and 30cm are set at the same longitude for all images.