MCD: Diverse Large-Scale Multi-Campus Dataset for Robot Perception

Thien-Minh Nguyen, Shenghai Yuan, Thien Hoang Nguyen, Pengyu Yin, Haozhi Cao, Lihua Xie, Maciej Wozniak, Patric Jensfelt, Marko Thiel, Justin Ziegenbein, Noel Blunder; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22304-22313

Perception plays a crucial role in various robot applications. However existing well-annotated datasets are biased towards autonomous driving scenarios while unlabelled SLAM datasets are quickly over-fitted and often lack environment and domain variations. To expand the frontier of these fields we introduce a comprehensive dataset named MCD (Multi-Campus Dataset) featuring a wide range of sensing modalities high-accuracy ground truth and diverse challenging environments across three Eurasian university campuses. MCD comprises both CCS (Classical Cylindrical Spinning) and NRE (Non-Repetitive Epicyclic) lidars high-quality IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) cameras and UWB (Ultra-WideBand) sensors. Furthermore in a pioneering effort we introduce semantic annotations of 29 classes over 59k sparse NRE lidar scans across three domains thus providing a novel challenge to existing semantic segmentation research upon this largely unexplored lidar modality. Finally we propose for the first time to the best of our knowledge continuous-time ground truth based on optimization-based registration of lidar-inertial data on large survey-grade prior maps which are also publicly released each several times the size of existing ones. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of numerous state-of-the-art algorithms on MCD report their performance and highlight the challenges awaiting solutions from the research community.