MSU-4S - The Michigan State University Four Seasons Dataset

Daniel Kent, Mohammed Alyaqoub, Xiaohu Lu, Hamed Khatounabadi, Kookjin Sung, Cole Scheller, Alexander Dalat, Asma bin Thabit, Roberto Whitley, Hayder Radha; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22658-22667

Public datasets such as KITTI nuScenes and Waymo have played a key role in the research and development of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. However many of these datasets fail to incorporate a full range of driving conditions; some datasets only contain clear-weather conditions underrepresenting or entirely missing colder weather conditions such as snow or autumn scenes with bright colorful foliage. In this paper we present the Michigan State University Four Seasons (MSU-4S) Dataset which contains real-world collections of autonomous vehicle data from varied types of driving scenarios. These scenarios were recorded throughout a full range of seasons and capture clear rainy snowy and fall weather conditions at varying times of day. MSU-4S contains more than 100000 two- and three-dimensional frames for camera lidar and radar data as well as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) wheel speed and steering data all annotated with weather time-of-day and time-of-year. Our data includes cluttered scenes that have large numbers of vehicles and pedestrians; and it also captures industrial scenes busy traffic thoroughfare with traffic lights and numerous signs and scenes with dense foliage. While providing a diverse set of scenes our data incorporate an important feature: virtually every scene and its corresponding lidar camera and radar frames were captured in four different seasons enabling unparalleled object detection analysis and testing of the domain shift problem across weather conditions. In that context we present detailed analyses for 3D and 2D object detection showing a strong domain shift effect among MSU-4S data segments collected across different conditions. MSU-4S will also enable advanced multimodal fusion research including different combinations of camera-lidar-radar fusion which continues to be of strong interest for the computer vision autonomous driving and ADAS development communities. The MSU-4S dataset is available online at https://egr.msu.edu/waves/msu4s.