VALID: A Comprehensive Virtual Aerial Image Dataset

Aerial imagery plays an important role in land-use planning, population analysis, precision agriculture, and unmanned aerial vehicle tasks. However, existing aerial image datasets generally suffer from the problem of inaccurate labeling, single ground truth type, and few category numbers. In this work, we implement a simulator that can simultaneously acquire diverse visual ground truth data in the virtual environment. Based on that, we collect a comprehensive Virtual AeriaL Image Dataset named VALID, consisting of 6690 high-resolution images, all annotated with panoptic segmentation on 30 categories, object detection with oriented bounding box, and binocular depth maps, collected in 6 different virtual scenes and 5 various ambient conditions (sunny, dusk, night, snow and fog). To our knowledge, VALID is the first aerial image dataset that can provide panoptic level segmentation and complete dense depth maps. We analyze the characteristics of VALID and evaluate state-of-the-art methods for multiple tasks to provide reference baselines. The experiment results demonstrate that VALID is well presented and challenging. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/view/valid-dataset/.