RarePlanes: Exploring the Value of Synthetic Data from an Overhead Perspective

RarePlanes is a unique open-source machine learning dataset from CosmiQ Works and AI.Reverie that incorporates both real and synthetically generated satellite imagery. The RarePlanes dataset specifically focuses on the value of AI.Reverie 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 novel simulation platform and features 50,000 synthetic satellite images 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. The talk will focus on the dataset and on various experiments with the dataset. These experiments show the value of synthetic data for the task of detecting and classifying aircraft from an overhead perspective.