Dense500

Fully observed satellite tile pyramids for multi-scale tile completion. Each site is a complete depth-4 quadtree: 85 tiles of 256×256 at four consecutive zoom levels (1 + 4 + 16 + 64), so any seed configuration can be completed and scored against ground truth at every level. This is the benchmark of Genesis (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026). A companion retrieval split with object annotations and captions is in MVRL/dense500-retrieval and MVRL/dense500-retrieval-instances.

Construction

Site centers were sampled worldwide with a population prior and continent stratification, restricted to populated areas. Sites are organized in five zoom windows, each sliding a four-level span up the pyramid; for each site, every tile between its root zoom and its leaf zoom was collected. Sites whose imagery source changes between adjacent zoom levels were removed, so every site is visually coherent across its four zooms.

Window	Root zoom	Leaf zoom
W1	11	14
W2	12	15
W3	13	16
W4	14	17
W5	15	18

Schema

Each row is one tile.

Column	Type	Description
image	image	256×256 JPEG
location	string	Tile key "{zoom}_{x}_{y}" (Web Mercator)
site_id	string	Groups all 85 tiles of one quadtree
tag	string	naeu_urban or global_urban
continent	string	NA, EU, Asia, Africa, SA, Oceania
site_lon, site_lat	float64	Site center (degrees)
zoom, tile_x, tile_y	int32	Web Mercator tile coordinates
site_start_zoom, site_leaf_zoom	int32	Root and leaf zoom of the site
site_depth	int32	Always 4
is_root, is_leaf	bool	Tile position in its site
zoom_window	int32	1 to 5, W1 to W5
site_index_in_window	int32	Site index within its window

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("MVRL/dense500", split="train")

from collections import defaultdict
by_site = defaultdict(list)
for row in ds:
    by_site[row["site_id"]].append(row)

w3 = ds.filter(lambda r: r["zoom_window"] == 3)

Citation

@inproceedings{khanal2026genesis,
  author    = {Khanal, Subash and Cui, Yangzhi and Cher, Daniel and Xing, Eric and Wei, Brian and Sastry, Srikumar and Jacobs, Nathan},
  title     = {Genesis: A Generative Engine for Hierarchical Satellite Image Synthesis},
  booktitle = {ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL)},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.1145/3841645.3843313}
}