Multi-weather city: Adverse weather stacking for autonomous driving

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles make use of sensors to perceive the world around them, with heavy reliance on vision-based sensors such as RGB cameras. Unfortunately, since these sensors are affected by adverse weather, perception pipelines require extensive training on visual data under harsh conditions in order to improve the robustness of downstream tasks - data that is difficult and expensive to acquire. Based on GAN and CycleGAN architectures, we propose an overall (modular) architecture for constructing datasets, which allows one to add, swap out and combine components in order to generate images with diverse weather conditions. Starting from a single dataset with ground-truth, we generate 7 versions of the same data in diverse weather, and propose an extension to augment the generated conditions, thus resulting in a total of 14 adverse weather conditions, requiring a single ground truth. We test the quality of the generated conditions both in terms of perceptual quality and suitability for training downstream tasks, using real world, out-of-distribution adverse weather extracted from various datasets. We show improvements in both object detection and instance segmentation across all conditions, in many cases exceeding 10 percentage points increase in AP, and provide the materials and instructions needed to re-construct the multi-weather dataset, based upon the original Cityscapes dataset.