RS2G: Data-Driven Scene-Graph Extraction and Embedding for Robust Autonomous Perception and Scenario Understanding

Effectively capturing intricate interactions among road users plays a critical role in achieving safe navigation for autonomous vehicles. While graph learning (GL) has emerged as a promising approach to tackle this challenge, existing GL models rely on predefined domain-specific graph extraction rules and often fail in real-world dynamic scenarios. Additionally, these graph extraction rules severely impede the capability of existing GL methods to generalize knowledge across domains. To address this issue, we propose RoadScene2Graph (RS2G), an innovative autonomous scenario understanding framework with a novel data-driven graph extraction and modeling approach that dynamically captures the diverse relations among road users. Our evaluations show that on average RS2G outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) rule-based graph extraction method by 4.47% and the SOTA deep learning model by 22.19% in subjective risk assessment. RS2G also delivers notably better performance in transferring knowledge gained from simulations to unseen real-world scenarios.