The exiD Dataset: A Real-World Trajectory Dataset of Highly Interactive Highway Scenarios in Germany

Development and safety validation of highly automated vehicles increasingly relies on data and data-driven methods. In processing sensor datasets for environment perception, it is common to use public and commercial datasets for training and evaluating machine learning based systems. For system-level evaluation and safety validation of an automated driving system, real-world trajectory datasets are of great value for several tasks in the process, i.a. for testing in simulation, scenario extraction or training of road user agent models. Ground-based recording methods such as sensor-equipped vehicles or infrastructure sensors are sometimes limited, for instance, due to their field of view. Camera-equipped drones, however, offer the ability to record road users without vehicle-to-vehicle occlusion and without influencing traffic. The highway drone dataset (highD) has shown that the recording method is efficient in terms of cumulative kilometers and has become a benchmark dataset for many research questions. It contains many vehicle interactions due to dense traffic, but lacks merging scenarios, which are challenging for highly automated vehicles. Therefore, we propose this highway drone dataset called exiD, recorded using camera-equipped drones at entries and exits on the German Autobahn. The dataset contains 69 172 road users classified as car, truck and vans and a total amount of more than 16 hours of measurement data. For non-commercial public research, the exiD dataset is available free of charge at https://www.exid-dataset.com.