arXiv Computer Vision

Real-World Perception for Autonomous Driving in Adverse Weather: Enhancing Standard Detectors via Foundation-Guided Auto-Annotation

The paper presents a foundation-guided auto‑annotation pipeline that improves standard autonomous driving object detectors in adverse weather. By benchmarking YOLOv8, Co‑DETR, and SAM3 on a custom dataset of 25 operational scenarios, the authors find SAM3 to be the most robust and use it offline to generate pseudo‑labels. Fine‑tuning YOLOv8 on these labels boosts overall mAP by 16.04% and yields significant gains in specific conditions such as Residential Direct Sunlight (32.73%) and Highway Fog (28.65%).

arXiv AI
Aug 20

One-Stage Object Detectors in Autonomous Driving

The paper surveys one‑stage object detectors for autonomous driving, covering the evolution from early models like YOLOv1 and SSD to recent real‑time architectures such as YOLOv10 and anchor‑free detectors like FCOS and CenterNet. It compares these methods on design choices, feature‑fusion strategies, loss functions, deployment trade‑offs, and benchmark performance, while also summarizing datasets, evaluation metrics, open challenges, and future research directions. The survey emphasizes how one‑stage detectors balance speed, accuracy, efficiency, and robustness, noting the gap between benchmark results and dependable real‑world performance.

By Jonel Roman, Ryan Sirjue, Peter Nguyen, Daniel Krutky, Juan Jesus, Sudip Dhakal
arXiv AI
Jul 28

ObsDriveBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding under Adverse Weather with Observability Awareness

arXiv:2607. 23537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving under adverse weather remains a critical challenge, yet existing vision-language benchmarks mainly evaluate under standard conditions, synthetic corruptions, or single modality.

By Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang, Zhenghao Xing, Jiaqi Xu, Pheng-Ann Heng
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Towards Robust Driving Perception: A Flexible Scale-Driven Family for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

The paper introduces FlexDepth, a family of self‑supervised monocular depth estimation models designed for robust driving perception. FlexDepth uses a two‑stage static‑dynamic decoupled training strategy and a Scale‑Driven Decoder that selects components based on scale size, enabling efficient feature fusion and high‑precision depth maps. Experiments on driving benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance across arbitrary scales with minimal computational cost, with the smallest model (Flex‑Nano) achieving 37.6 FPS on mobile devices.

By Zhaowen Zhu, Li Zhang, Yujie Chen, Tian Zhang, Yingjie Wang, Mingxia Zhan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

Multi-Modal Traffic Sign Detection with Semantic Attributes for Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces a multi‑modal traffic sign detection framework that fuses camera and LiDAR data using an Intensity‑Aware Deformable Fusion module to align retro‑reflective LiDAR cues with visual features. It also presents a dual motion‑model tracker to handle non‑linear perspective changes and a semantic attribute classification pipeline that estimates occlusion, readability, sign embeddedness, and road relevance. Evaluated on a dataset covering more than 60 countries and 2,500 hours of driving, the system achieves an Object Miss Ratio of 0.49% across 221,068 sequences, indicating strong global generalization for autonomous driving.

By Meda Lazar, Sourab Sridhar, Shashwata Gupta, Alexandra Tripcea, Varun Ravi, Senthil Yogamani
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Chinese Rural Scenes: An Experimental Study on Real-Synthetic Data Mixing and Model Evaluation

Currently, autonomous driving object detection models face significant data scarcity and generalization challenges when navigating complex Chinese rural traffic scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel real-synthetic mixed object detection dataset tailored specifically for Chinese rural roads and systematically evaluate the performance of 13 mainstream detectors under different real-to-synthetic data ratios, thereby providing empirical evidence for model selection and data strategy design in rural autonomous driving scenarios.