The DriveU Traffic Light Dataset: Introduction and Comparison with Existing Datasets

Autonomous driving is a topic in computer vision which has captured a great deal of attention in recent years. One key problem is the detection and state analysis of traffic lights. Even over time, very few datasets for research in this topic have been published and they vary widely in quantity and in quality. To address the complexity of traffic light recognition, we introduce the DriveU**driveU is a joint innovation center of the Daimler AG and the University of Ulm Traffic Light Dataset (DTLD), a large-scale dataset consisting of more than 230,000 annotations. All annotations are hand-labeled according to strict rules and show a high quality. Recordings were made in eleven different cities during different weather conditions. Our dataset exceeds previous traffic light datasets in size, variance, annotation quality and amount of additional sensor data. We prove the extent of our dataset by an extensive comparison with existing traffic light datasets. Miscellaneous dataset criteria are compared, illustrated and statistically analyzed. In the process, metrics to express the quality and variance of datasets are developed and verified. The dataset can be downloaded from http://traffic-light-data.de.