IDD: A Dataset for Exploring Problems of Autonomous Navigation in Unconstrained Environments

While several datasets for autonomous navigation have become available in recent years, they have tended to focus on structured driving environments. This usually corresponds to well-delineated infrastructure such as lanes, a small number of well-defined categories for traffic participants, low variation in object or background appearance and strong adherence to traffic rules. We propose DS, a novel dataset for road scene understanding in unstructured environments where the above assumptions are largely not satisfied. It consists of 10,004 images, finely annotated with 34 classes collected from 182 drive sequences on Indian roads. The label set is expanded in comparison to popular benchmarks such as Cityscapes, to account for new classes. It also reflects label distributions of road scenes significantly different from existing datasets, with most classes displaying greater within-class diversity. Consistent with real driving behaviors, it also identifies new classes such as drivable areas besides the road. We propose a new four-level label hierarchy, which allows varying degrees of complexity and opens up possibilities for new training methods. Our empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the label characteristics. State-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation achieve much lower accuracies on our dataset, demonstrating its distinction compared to Cityscapes. Finally, we propose that our dataset is an ideal opportunity for new problems such as domain adaptation, few-shot learning and behavior prediction in road scenes.