Bad weather dataset could aid autonomous vehicles

The Radiate project led by Heriot-Watt University has published a new dataset that includes three hours of radar images and 200,000 tagged 'road actors' including bicycles, cars, pedestrians, and traffic signs.

To date, almost all the available, labelled data has been based on bright and clear days, so no public data has been available to help develop autonomous vehicles that can operate safely in adverse weather conditions. It has also relied primarily on data collected from optical sensors, which do not work as well during bad weather.

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According to Heriot-Watt, Professor Andrew Wallace and Dr Sen Wang have been collecting the data since 2019 after equipping a vehicle with light detection and ranging (LiDAR), radar and stereo cameras, and geopositioning devices.

They drove the vehicle around Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands to capture urban and rural roads at all times of day and night, purposefully chasing bad weather.