MCTED: A Machine-Learning-Ready Dataset for Digital Elevation Model Generation From Mars Imagery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Osadnik, Rafał, Gómez, Pablo, Bohacek, Eleni, Bahia, Rickbir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Osadnik, Rafał
Gómez, Pablo
Bohacek, Eleni
Bahia, Rickbir
author_facet Osadnik, Rafał
Gómez, Pablo
Bohacek, Eleni
Bahia, Rickbir
contents This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_08027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MCTED: A Machine-Learning-Ready Dataset for Digital Elevation Model Generation From Mars Imagery
Osadnik, Rafał
Gómez, Pablo
Bohacek, Eleni
Bahia, Rickbir
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.
title MCTED: A Machine-Learning-Ready Dataset for Digital Elevation Model Generation From Mars Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08027