In the realm of autonomous transportation, there have been many initiatives for open-sourcing self-driving cars datasets, but much less for alternative methods of transportation such as trains. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap by introducing FRSign, a large-scale and accurate dataset for vision-based railway traffic light detection and recognition. Our recordings were made on selected running trains in France and benefited from carefully hand-labeled annotations. An illustrative dataset which corresponds to ten percent of the acquired data to date is published in open source with the paper. It contains more than 100,000 images illustrating six types of French railway traffic lights and their possible color combinations, together with the relevant information regarding their acquisition such as date, time, sensor parameters, and bounding boxes. This dataset is published in open-source at the address \url{https://frsign.irt-systemx.fr}. We compare, analyze various properties of the dataset and provide metrics to express its variability. We also discuss specific challenges and particularities related to autonomous trains in comparison to autonomous cars.
The ATLAS of Traffic Lights: A Reliable Perception Framework for Autonomous Driving
FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Technical Cognitive Systems（FZI信息技术研究所以及技术认知系统）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Research Group Applied Technical-Cognitive Systems（卡尔斯鲁厄大学（KIT）应用技术认知系统研究组）
A car driver knows how to react on the gestures of the traffic officers. Clearly, this is not the case for the autonomous vehicle, unless it has road traffic control gesture recognition functionalities. In this work, we address the limitation of the existing autonomous driving datasets to provide learning data for traffic control gesture recognition. We introduce a dataset that is based on 3D body skeleton input to perform traffic control gesture classification on every time step. Our dataset consists of 250 sequences from several actors, ranging from 16 to 90 seconds per sequence. To evaluate…
This study developed a traffic sign detection and recognition algorithm based on the RetinaNet. Two main aspects were revised to improve the detection of traffic signs: image cropping to address the issue of large image and small traffic signs; and using more anchors with various scales to detect traffic signs with different sizes and shapes. The proposed algorithm was trained and tested in a series of autonomous driving front-view images in a virtual simulation environment. Results show that the algorithm performed extremely well under good illumination and weather conditions. Its drawbacks a…
TrafficSignBench: Rule-Centric Closed-Loop Evaluation of Traffic-Sign Compliance in Autonomous Driving
Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；FusionBrain Lab（FusionBrain实验室）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；HSE University（高等经济大学）；Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学）；NUST MISIS（国立研究型技术大学莫斯科国立钢铁合金学院）
We address one of the crucial aspects necessary for safe and efficient operations of autonomous vehicles, namely predicting future state of traffic actors in the autonomous vehicle's surroundings. We introduce a deep learning-based approach that takes into account a current world state and produces raster images of each actor's vicinity. The rasters are then used as inputs to deep convolutional models to infer future movement of actors while also accounting for and capturing inherent uncertainty of the prediction task. Extensive experiments on real-world data strongly suggest benefits of the p…
Human-vehicle cooperative driving has become the critical technology of autonomous driving, which reduces the workload of human drivers. However, the complex and uncertain road environments bring great challenges to the visual perception of cooperative systems. And the perception characteristics of autonomous driving differ from manual driving a lot. To enhance the visual perception capability of human-vehicle cooperative driving, this paper proposed a cooperative visual perception model. 506 images of complex road and traffic scenarios were collected as the data source. Then this paper improv…
To safely and rationally participate in dense and heterogeneous traffic, autonomous vehicles require to sufficiently analyze the motion patterns of surrounding traffic-agents and accurately predict their future trajectories. This is challenging because the trajectories of traffic-agents are not only influenced by the traffic-agents themselves but also by spatial interaction with each other. Previous methods usually rely on the sequential step-by-step processing of Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and merely extract the interactions between spatial neighbors for single type traffic-agent…
Enhancing LLM-based Autonomous Driving with Modular Traffic Light and Sign Recognition
Institute for Intelligent Systems（智能系统研究所）；Esslingen University of Applied Sciences（应用科学大学埃斯林根）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）
Detection of rare objects (e.g., traffic cones, traffic barrels and traffic warning triangles) is an important perception task to improve the safety of autonomous driving. Training of such models typically requires a large number of annotated data which is expensive and time consuming to obtain. To address the above problem, an emerging approach is to apply data augmentation to automatically generate cost-free training samples. In this work, we propose a systematic study on simple Copy-Paste data augmentation for rare object detection in autonomous driving. Specifically, local adaptive instanc…
Laboratory for Intelligent & Safe Automobiles（智能与安全汽车实验室）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
Detecting road traffic signs and accurately determining how they can affect the driver's future actions is a critical task for safe autonomous driving systems. However, various traffic signs in a driving scene have an unequal impact on the driver's decisions, making detecting the salient traffic signs a more important task. Our research addresses this issue, constructing a traffic sign detection model which emphasizes performance on salient signs, or signs that influence the decisions of a driver. We define a traffic sign salience property and use it to construct the LAVA Salient Signs Dataset…
Considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding of road scenes with monocular cameras. It is, however, mainly related to certain classes such as cars and pedestrians. This work investigates traffic cones, an object class crucial for traffic control in the context of autonomous vehicles. 3D object detection using images from a monocular camera is intrinsically an ill-posed problem. In this work, we leverage the unique structure of traffic cones and propose a pipelined approach to the problem. Specifically, we first detect cones in images by a tailored 2D object detector; the…
YOLO-PPA based Efficient Traffic Sign Detection for Cruise Control in Autonomous Driving
The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Washington University, St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）
The University of Alabama（阿拉巴马大学）；Alabama Transportation Institute（阿拉巴马交通研究所）
Human trafficking is a universal problem, persistent despite numerous efforts to combat it globally. Individuals of any age, race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status, cultural background, religion, socioeconomic class, and education can be a victim of human trafficking. With the advancements in technology and the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs), human traffickers will adopt new ways to transport victims, which could accelerate the growth of organized human trafficking networks, which can make the detection of trafficking in persons mo…
Predicting future trajectories of surrounding obstacles is a crucial task for autonomous driving cars to achieve a high degree of road safety. There are several challenges in trajectory prediction in real-world traffic scenarios, including obeying traffic rules, dealing with social interactions, handling traffic of multi-class movement, and predicting multi-modal trajectories with probability. Inspired by people's natural habit of navigating traffic with attention to their goals and surroundings, this paper presents a unique dynamic graph attention network to solve all those challenges. The ne…
Despite the advancement in the technology of autonomous driving cars, the safety of a self-driving car is still a challenging problem that has not been well studied. Motion prediction is one of the core functions of an autonomous driving car. Previously, we propose a novel scheme called GRIP which is designed to predict trajectories for traffic agents around an autonomous car efficiently. GRIP uses a graph to represent the interactions of close objects, applies several graph convolutional blocks to extract features, and subsequently uses an encoder-decoder long short-term memory (LSTM) model t…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
We propose a novel and pragmatic framework for traffic scene perception with roadside cameras. The proposed framework covers a full-stack of roadside perception pipeline for infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving, including object detection, object localization, object tracking, and multi-camera information fusion. Unlike previous vision-based perception frameworks rely upon depth offset or 3D annotation at training, we adopt a modular decoupling design and introduce a landmark-based 3D localization method, where the detection and localization can be well decoupled so that the model can be…
This paper presents GAMMA, a general motion prediction model that enables large-scale real-time simulation and planning for autonomous driving. GAMMA models heterogeneous, interactive traffic agents. They operate under diverse road conditions, with various geometric and kinematic constraints. GAMMA treats the prediction task as constrained optimization in traffic agents' velocity space. The objective is to optimize an agent's driving performance, while obeying all the constraints resulting from the agent's kinematics, collision avoidance with other agents, and the environmental context. Furthe…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
An accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for safe and efficient autonomous driving in complex traffic environments. In recent years, artificial intelligence has shown strong capabilities in improving prediction accuracy. However, its characteristics of inexplicability and uncertainty make it challenging to determine the traffic environmental effect on prediction explicitly, posing significant challenges to safety-critical decision-making. To address these challenges, this study proposes a trajectory prediction framework with the epistemic uncertainty estimation ability that outputs high un…
DragTraffic: Interactive and Controllable Traffic Scene Generation for Autonomous Driving
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Lotus Technology Ltd（路特斯科技有限公司）
Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center（罗伯特·博世研究与技术中心）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世股份有限公司）
Traffic light detection is crucial for environment perception and decision-making in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art detectors are built upon deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and have exhibited promising performance. However, one looming concern with CNN based detectors is how to thoroughly evaluate the performance of accuracy and robustness before they can be deployed to autonomous vehicles. In this work, we propose a visual analytics system, VATLD, equipped with a disentangled representation learning and semantic adversarial learning, to assess, understand, and improve the accu…
The last decades have witnessed the breakthrough of autonomous vehicles (AVs), and the perception capabilities of AVs have been dramatically improved. Various sensors installed on AVs, including, but are not limited to, LiDAR, radar, camera and stereovision, will be collecting massive data and perceiving the surrounding traffic states continuously. In fact, a fleet of AVs can serve as floating (or probe) sensors, which can be utilized to infer traffic information while cruising around the roadway networks. In contrast, conventional traffic sensing methods rely on fixed traffic sensors such as …
Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（英戈尔施塔特应用技术大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Is the ethics of autonomous vehicles (AVs) restricted to weighing lives in unavoidable accidents? We argue that AVs distribute risks between road users in regular traffic situations, either explicitly or implicitly. This distribution of risks raises ethically relevant questions that cannot be evaded by simple heuristics such as "hitting the brakes." Using an interactive, graphical representation of different traffic situations, we measured participants' preferences on driving maneuvers of AVs in a representative survey in Germany. Our participants' preferences deviated significantly from mere …
Towards Lawful Autonomous Driving: Deriving Scenario-Aware Driving Requirements from Traffic Laws and Regulations
College of Transportation, Tongji University（同济大学交通运输学院）；The Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education（教育部道路与交通工程重点实验室）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与移动性学院）；College of Computer Science, University of Central Florida（佛罗里达中央大学计算机科学学院）；Optixway AI
