Photo: Toyota
Toyota and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology have released a new and freely accessible video dataset in the hopes it may help researchers better develop self-driving technology.
Dubbed DriveSeg, the dataset is meant to show how autonomous driving systems may perceive the environment around them, as well as how they could learn from past experiences to recognize future patterns and safely navigate new, unpredictable situations.
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“In sharing this dataset, we hope to encourage researchers, the industry, and other innovators to develop new insight and direction into temporal AI modeling that enables the next generation of assisted driving and automotive safety technologies,” said MIT principal researcher Bryan Reimer.
DriveSeg is made up of two parts: manual and semi-auto. The first is nearly three minutes of high-resolution footage captured on the busy streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Every pixel on each of the 5,000 frames of footage was manually assigned a label based on 12 classes of road objects.
The second dataset totals 20,100 video frames and uses the same annotation logic as the first. However, these annotations were completed through a semi-automatic method developed by MIT. Essentially, it’s the AI that teaches the self-driving AI how to see.
“Predictive power is an important part of human intelligence,” said Rini Sherony, senior principal engineer at the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center. “Whenever we drive, we are always tracking the movements of the environment around us to identify potential risks and make safer decisions. By sharing this dataset, we hope to accelerate research into autonomous driving systems and advanced safety features that are more attuned to the complexity of the environment around them.”
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Toyota says DriveSeg is available for free to researchers and the academic community, as long as it is used for non-commercial purposes.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.
