Motional Expands Groundbreaking nuScenes Datasets To Enable A Safer, Smarter Autonomous Driving Industry

Motional, a global leader in driverless technology, announces an expansion to nuScenes, the industry-leading dataset that teaches autonomous vehicles how to safely engage with ever-changing road environments.  nuScenes now includes nuScenes-lidarseg and nuImages.

nuScenes: A Background

nuScenes, created in March 2019, was the first publicly available dataset of its kind and pioneered an industry-wide culture of safety-focused data-sharing and collaboration.  It launched as a collection of 1,000 urban “street-scenes” in Boston and Singapore. The scenes, composed of millions of photos and data-points collected from the vehicles’ full sensor suites, were then meticulously hand-annotated and used to inform and advance machine learning models to build the safest possible self-driving vehicles.

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The nuScenes Expansion

nuScenes dataset becomes even more robust:

nuScenes-lidarseg is the application of lidar segmentation to the original 1,000 Singapore and Boston driving scenes, making it the largest publicly available dataset of its kind.   Lidar segmentation provides a significantly more detailed picture of a vehicle’s surroundings than the original nuScenes’ bounding boxes and adds an astonishing 1.4B annotated lidar points.  It’s a significant step forward for the industry; it allows researchers to study and quantify novel challenges such as lidar point cloud segmentation and foreground extraction.
nuImages is a brand new dataset. It comprises nearly 100,000 annotated images, carefully selected to generate a wide range of unpredictable, challenging driving conditions.  nuImages was created in response to user demand and will help self-driving vehicles safely navigate unusual scenarios – like jaywalkers, large intersections, and challenging weather conditions.

The nuScenes expansion is a demonstration of Motional’s commitment to making driverless vehicles a safe and reliable reality.

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A Culture of Information Sharing

Since release, over 8,000 researchers have used nuScenes, with over 250 scientific papers published using the data. Furthermore, nuScenes gave rise to a thriving culture of information-sharing in the autonomous vehicle industry. In the year-and-a-half since launch, more than ten new datasets have been made publicly available across the industry, helping to build safer, more educated autonomous vehicles.

“Safety transcends competition,” said Karl Iagnemma, President and CEO, Motional. “The belief that passenger safety must take priority over any competitive advantage is at the heart of nuScenes. We’ve been delighted to see so many peers follow suit and release their own datasets, all for the betterment of the industry.”

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