Leveraging combinatorial testing for safety-critical computer vision datasets

Deep learning-based approaches have gained popularity for environment perception tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection from images. However, the different nature of a data-driven deep neural nets (DNN) to conventional software is a challenge for practical software verification. In this work, we show how existing methods from software engineering provide benefits for the development of a DNN and in particular for dataset design and analysis. We show how combinatorial testing based on a domain model can be leveraged for generating test sets providing coverage guarantees with respect to important environmental features and their interaction. Additionally, we show how our approach can be used for growing a dataset, i.e. to identify where data is missing and should be collected next. We evaluate our approach on an internal use case and two public datasets.