Ithaca365: Dataset and Driving Perception Under Repeated and Challenging Weather Conditions

Carlos A. Diaz-Ruiz, Youya Xia, Yurong You, Jose Nino, Junan Chen, Josephine Monica, Xiangyu Chen, Katie Luo, Yan Wang, Marc Emond, Wei-Lun Chao, Bharath Hariharan, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Mark Campbell; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 21383-21392

Advances in perception for self-driving cars have accelerated in recent years due to the availability of large-scale datasets, typically collected at specific locations and under nice weather conditions. Yet, to achieve the high safety requirement, these perceptual systems must operate robustly under a wide variety of weather conditions including snow and rain. In this paper, we present a new dataset to enable robust autonomous driving via a novel data collection process --- data is repeatedly recorded along a 15 km route under diverse scene (urban, highway, rural, campus), weather (snow, rain, sun), time (day/night), and traffic conditions (pedestrians, cyclists and cars). The dataset includes images and point clouds from cameras and LiDAR sensors, along with high-precision GPS/INS to establish correspondence across routes. The dataset includes road and object annotations using amodal masks to capture partial occlusions and 2D/3D bounding boxes. We demonstrate the uniqueness of this dataset by analyzing the performance of baselines in amodal segmentation of road and objects, depth estimation, and 3D object detection. The repeated routes opens new research directions in object discovery, continual learning, and anomaly detection.