{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/vme-a-satellite-imagery-dataset-and-benchmark","title":"VME: A Satellite Imagery Dataset and Benchmark for Detecting Vehicles in the Middle East and Beyond","arxiv_id":"2505.22353","date":"2025-05-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Noora Al-Emadi","Ingmar Weber","Yin Yang","Ferda Ofli"],"abstract":"Detecting vehicles in satellite images is crucial for traffic management, urban planning, and disaster response. However, current models struggle with real-world diversity, particularly across different regions. This challenge is amplified by geographic bias in existing datasets, which often focus on specific areas and overlook regions like the Middle East. To address this gap, we present the Vehicles in the Middle East (VME) dataset, designed explicitly for vehicle detection in high-resolution satellite images from Middle Eastern countries. Sourced from Maxar, the VME dataset spans 54 cities across 12 countries, comprising over 4,000 image tiles and more than 100,000 vehicles, annotated using both manual and semi-automated methods. Additionally, we introduce the largest benchmark dataset for Car Detection in Satellite Imagery (CDSI), combining images from multiple sources to enhance global car detection. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on existing datasets perform poorly on Middle Eastern images, while the VME dataset significantly improves detection accuracy in this region. Moreover, state-of-the-art models trained on CDSI achieve substantial improvements in global car detection.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22353v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22353v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"vme-a-satellite-imagery-dataset-and-benchmark","repo_url":"https://github.com/nalemadi/VME_CDSI_dataset_benchmark","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"disaster-response","task_name":"Disaster Response"},{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-in-aerial-images","task_name":"Object Detection In Aerial Images"},{"task_slug":"small-object-detection","task_name":"Small Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"vehicle-detection","task_name":"vehicle detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"vme-cdsi","name":"VME & CDSI","full_name":"Vehicles in the Middle East (VME) & Car Detection in Satellite Imagery (CDSI) datasets"}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/object-detection-in-aerial-images-on-vme-cdsi","task":"Object Detection In Aerial Images","dataset":"VME & CDSI","model":"DINO","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":1,"metrics":{"mAP50":"86.5"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}