Waymo is making some of its self-driving car data available for free to researchers



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The data collected by self-driving cars used to be a closely guarded secret. But recently, many companies are developing their driving systems. The latest to do so is Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, which today is making some of the high-resolution sensor data collected by its fleet of autonomous vehicles available to researchers.

Waymo says its dataset contains 1,000 driving segments, with each segment capturing 20 seconds of continuous driving. Those 20-second clips correspond to 200,000 frames at 10 Hz per sensor, which will allow researchers to develop their own models to track the behavior of everyone using the road, from drivers to pedestrians to cyclists.

The data was collected by San Francisco, Mountain View, Phoenix, and Kirkland, Washington. It includes images captured by each vehicle's sensors, which includes LIDAR, cameras, and radar. Those images with vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, and signage have been carefully labeled, presenting a total of 12 million 3D labels and 1.2 million 2D labels.


"To me, it's a bit of a labor of love," Drago Anguelov, Waymo's head of research, said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. "I think that such a writing is a lot of work. And it is important to ensure the highest standards of quality, making sure that the right utilities are available to researchers to make progress without being hamstrung. "

Waymo is not the first company to release an open dataset. In March, Aptiv has become one of the first broad-based AV operators. Uber and Cruise, the autonomous division of General Motors, have also released their AV visualization tools to the public. In June at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Long Beach, Waymo, and Argo Today's announcement is Waymo making good on that promise.

Waymo also claims its data is more detailed and nuanced than those released by other companies. Most of the previous datasets have been limited to Aptiv's NuScenes dataset included LIDAR and radar data in addition to camera images. Waymo is providing data from five LIDAR sensors, compared to just one in the Aptiv data set.

And this is just the first step; Anguelov says Waymo intends to release further data sets in the future.

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