Unifying Panoptic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

Oliver Zendel, Matthias Schörghuber, Bernhard Rainer, Markus Murschitz, Csaba Beleznai; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 21351-21360

This paper aims to improve panoptic segmentation for real-world applications in three ways. First, we present a label policy that unifies four of the most popular panoptic segmentation datasets for autonomous driving. We also clean up label confusion by adding the new vehicle labels pickup and van. Full relabeling information for the popular Mapillary Vistas, IDD, and Cityscapes dataset are provided to add these new labels to existing setups. Second, we introduce Wilddash2 (WD2), a new dataset and public benchmark service for panoptic segmentation. The dataset consists of more than 5000 unique driving scenes from all over the world with a focus on visually challenging scenes, such as diverse weather conditions, lighting situations, and camera characteristics. We showcase experimental visual hazard classifiers which help to pre-filter challenging frames during dataset creation. Finally, to characterize the robustness of algorithms in out-of-distribution situations, we introduce hazard-aware and negative testing for panoptic segmentation as well as statistical significance calculations that increase confidence for both concepts. Additionally, we present a novel technique for visualizing panoptic segmentation errors. Our experiments show the negative impact of visual hazards on panoptic segmentation quality. Additional data from the WD2 dataset improves performance for visually challenging scenes and thus robustness in real-world scenarios.