9 Dawn
9 Dawn
Abstract—Recently, self-driving vehicles have been introduced and ensure the required safety [4]. To detect such objects,
with several automated features including lane-keep assistance, diverse sensors such as cameras and light detection and ranging
queuing assistance in traffic-jam, parking assistance and crash are commonly utilized in autonomous vehicles. Among these
avoidance. These self-driving vehicles and intelligent visual traffic various types of sensors, the quality of camera’s images is quite
surveillance systems mainly depend on cameras and sensors fu- affected by adverse weather conditions such as heavy foggy,
sion systems. Adverse weather conditions such as heavy fog, rain,
arXiv:2008.05402v1 [cs.CV] 12 Aug 2020
confuse in the judgment of an accurate vehicle detection TABLE I: Summary of available vehicles datasets in literature.
and reduce the efficiency of vehicles detection under adverse Lighting variations as L, Occlusion as O, Crowded as C.
weather conditions and lead to a traffic accident. In other
words, it is extremely important to employ a vehicle detector Dataset Mode No. Image Video Test Train L O C
with high detection accuracy and consider this factor along UA-DETRAC [20] TSC 10 Hour × × × ×
TME Motorway [21] OVC 28 Clip × × ×
with the real time detection speed to reduce the false alarms KITTI [22] OVC × 7518 7481 × ×
of the detected bounding boxes and to allow space of time to Stanford car [23] web 16,185 50-50 50-50
improve the visibility in the traffic environment under adverse PASCAL VOC [24] web × × × × ×
Rain&Snow [25] TSC 22 Clip × ×
weather conditions and thus preventing traffic accidents. Cityscape [26] OVC 25,000 × × × × ×
The available vehicle datasets in literature still need to Mapillary [27] OVC 25,000 × × × × ×
address more challenging adverse weather conditions datasets. BDD100K [28] OVC 100,000 × × × × ×
ApolloScape [29] OVC 143,906 × × × × ×
Table I summarizes the available vehicles datasets in literature, Stanford Drone [30] drone × ×
where the datasets are collected by traffic surviellance camera
(TSC), On-raod vehicles camera (OVC), web servey (Web),
or by drone camera. On the other hand, there is no generic
datasets for the different adverse weather conditions such as
the combination of nasty winter weather, sleeting rain, and
dust storms. For instance, Sakaridis et al. [15] proposed a
convolution neural network (CNN) based model to generate
synthetic fog on real vehicle images to investigate defogging
algorithms in the traffic environments. Hodges et al. [16] ma-
nipulated the dehazing model by a dehazing network to reform Fig. 1: Sample images of the KITTI dataset.
the full image and a discriminator network to fine tunning
the enhancement weights parameters to increase the vehicle
detection performance on a dataset of synthetic foggy/hazy
images. Li et al. [17] presented a benchmark including both
synthetic and real-world rainy images with some rain types to
investigate deraining algorithms in traffic monitoring scene and
vehicle detection. Uzun et al. [18] implemented cycle-spinning Fig. 2: Sample images for vehicles in MS-COCO dataset.
with generative adversarial networks (GAN) for raindrops
removal in outdoor surveillance systems and investigated the
object detection performance under Raindrop dataset [19].
However, these methods are mainly evaluated on rendered proposed dataset for vehicle detection in adverse weather.
synthetic fog/rain images and few real images assuming a 1) KITTI dataset [22]: is the most widely used for on-
specific fog/rain model. It is thus unclear how these algorithms road vehicle detection and self-driving researches. The KITTI
would be proceeding on various adverse weather conditions dataset consists of 7,481 images for training and 7,518 images
and how the progress could be measured in the wild. for testing and includes six classes: car, van, truck, tram,
To solve the problem, a new benchmark dataset is introduced cyclist, and pedestrian. The input image size is 512×512 and
called DAWN consisting of real world images collected under 17,607 total bounding box of GT. The KITTI dataset considers
various adverse weather conditions (e.g., fog, rain, snow, and a traffic environment that covers freeways through rural zones
sandstorms). The collected images provide a diverse traffic and urban scenes with lighting variability in normal weather
environment (e.g., urban, crossroads, motorway, etc.) with conditions at daylight only as shown in Figure. 1.
various vehicles categories that are annotated for intelligent 2) The MS-COCO dataset [31]: is a more challenging
visual surveillance, traffic monitoring and self-driving vehicles scene understanding than KITTI dataset. It is often used by
applications. the current state-of-the-art deep learning models. MS-COCO
includes a large-scale of complex scenes annotated for 80
II. BACKGROUND classes where the traffic objects and environment scenes are
In this section, we present performance analysis of the addressing general settings for normal weather situations as
proposed methods under different adverse weather conditions shown in Figure. 2.
adapted on detecting vehicles categories (e.g., car, bus, truck, In these two datasets, the traffic scene is often addressing
motorcycle, bicycle) with the presence of human as a cate- normal weather conditions. Moreover, we clarify that the top-
gory (person) for pedestrian and cyclist in traffic environment performing methods for vehicle detection and visual scene
scenes. understanding do not completely apprehend the difficulty and
variability of poor real-world weather conditions. For more
A. Summary of the available vehicles image datasets in liter- details on scene understanding datasets, we refer the readers to
ature. [32]. The disparity of traffic images in DAWN dataset and the
In this part we provide an overview of the datasets used state of the art datasets (Rain & Snow and BDD) is compared
for evaluating vehicle detector models, as the detail of the and shown in Figure 3. DAWN dataset include extrem level
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Fig. 4: Sample images of the DAWN dataset illustrating four cases of adverse weather conditions.
Fig. 5: Examples of annotations in DAWN dataset. The dataset is annotated using LabelMe [33] into 7,845 total bounding boxes
of five types (e.g., car, bus, truck, motorcycles, and bicycles) and person for cyclist/pedestrian.
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