Winter adverse driving dataset for autonomy in inclement winter weather

Abstract

The availability of public datasets with annotated light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds has advanced autonomous driving tasks, such as semantic and panoptic segmentation. However, there is a lack of datasets focused on inclement weather. Snow and rain degrade visibility and introduce noise in LiDAR point clouds. In this article, summarize a 3-year winter weather data collection effort and introduce the winter adverse driving dataset. It is the first multimodal dataset featuring moderate to severe winter weather—weather that would cause an experienced driver to alter their driving behavior. Our dataset features exclusively events with heavy snowfall and occasional white-out conditions. Data are collected using high-resolution LiDAR, visible as well as near infrared (IR) cameras, a long wave IR camera, forward-facing radio detection and ranging, and Global Navigation Satellite Systems/Inertial Measurement Unit units. Our dataset is unique in the range of sensors and the severity of the conditions observed. It is also one of the only data sets to focus on rural and semi-rural environments. Over 36 TB of adverse winter data have been collected over 3 years. We also provide dense point-wise labels to sequential LiDAR scans collected in severe winter weather. We have labeled and will make available around 1000 sequential LiDAR scenes, amounting to over 7 GB or 3.6 billion labeled points. This is the first point-wise semantically labeled dataset to include falling snow.