PROMORE: A Procedural Modeler of Virtual Rural Environments With Artificial Dataset Generation Capabilities for Remote Sensing Contexts

Remote sensing (RS) is a rapidly evolving field that facilitates the study of phenomena on the Earth’s surface. Through various platforms, including satellites, manned aircraft, and remotely piloted aerial vehicles (RPAV), RS has been strategically applied to critical sectors like agriculture and forestry, which are essential for humanity’s sustenance. Key applications include crops classification, yield estimation and livestock monitoring and quantification. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), the development of deep learning (DL) models for such applications often requires extensive field data collection and labor-intensive image labeling, which are both time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address these challenges, this paper presents Procedural Modeling of Rural Environments (PROMORE), a parameterizable, ontology-driven system designed to generate 3D virtual environments encompassing forestry, farmland – mainly focused on vineyards – and village settings. This system also implements functionalities to automate the extraction of training data for deep learning applications in remote sensing, with the declared aim of providing complementary capabilities to data augmentation techniques, encompassing both traditional methods (e.g., flips, rotations, zooming) and advanced approaches such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). By simulating RPAV flights and managing virtual object visibility, PROMORE enables the automatic labeling, delineation, and highlighting of elements of interest (e.g., vine plants, trees, buildings), facilitating the generation of datasets tailored for tasks such as semantic segmentation, and object detection.