Application Story
Traffic behavior and scenario extraction from fixed sensors
Summary
This project involved a Truck OEM aiming to obtain traffic behavior and relevant driving scenarios to test their automated driving functions.
IVEX’s solution consists of a personalized data processing pipeline flexible enough to process data from fixed sensors on highways and intersections. From this data, we extract driving behaviors and relevant driving scenarios from each different vehicle passing by and we automatically generate standardized ASAM OpenSCENARIO XML and ASAM OpenDRIVE files, enabling the IVEX customer to test their system in a Simulation environment.
Key benefits:
- Save time & valuable resources on data collection campaigns
- Avoid complex infrastructure devops with real scalability and customization
- Easily access and interact with richer data, boosting teams’ efficiency and collaboration
Initial Situation
OEMs and Tier 1’s spend huge amounts of time and money to test and validate their ADAS functions. Usually, part of these tests are done by collecting real-world driving data during long driving campaigns for hundreds and thousands of kilometers with one or two engineers in the vehicle. The collected data is usually serving a single purpose to test one specific function or issue, and no additional value is extracted, which is far from optimal and does not allow further discoveries. Additionally, accessing and analyzing the data is often reserved to high technical people and developers, which compartmentalize the learnings from it as well as its communication.
Another way of obtaining valuable driving information is via traffic behavior analysis via extracting vehicle maneuvers from sensors mounted on the road infrastructure. This approach multiplies the chances of finding interesting driving scenarios to test vehicles, as every vehicle passing is a possible candidate. It also allows closing the loop from real-world to Simulation. With high quality digital twins extracted using ASAM OpenSCENARIO XML and ASAM OpenDRIVE, we can simulate the ego vehicle and ADAS feature from the perspective of any captured vehicle. This in fact multiplies the value of the recorded information.
In this application story, we will review how IVEX helped a Truck OEM to obtain driving naturalistic behaviors from intersections, analyze the data and automatically generate standardized digital twins to be used across different simulators.
Powered by ASAM standards, IVEX is transforming testing and Validation for our customers. By unlocking the full potential of data, we're not just meeting their needs; we're exceeding expectations, lowering time to market and driving innovation at every turn.
Mario Torres, CEO of IVEX
Success strategy / solution
IVEX software helps OEMs and Tier 1s in obtaining the maximum of their data collected from static sensors installed on road infrastructures.
IVEX customer starts by ingesting camera and LiDAR recorded data from selected intersections. The ingested data can be formatted in ASAM OpenLABEL or any other format.
The tailored data processing pipeline automatically analyzes the recordings using IVEX’s own developed algorithms and customer algorithms in docker modules. The pipeline applied here includes computer vision models to detect and extract the vehicles in 3D, tracking algorithms, homography calculations, measurements and KPIs computations and IVEX’s own scenario extraction algorithms to find and extract interesting known driving behaviors.
The analyzed data and results are available in IVEX Data Analytics Platform for easy visualization, inspection and interaction of the different scenarios found. It is accessible also to people without specific technical knowledge, which brings teams together, helping engineers to quickly get insights from the data, as well as the management level to make wiser data-based decisions inspecting interactive reports without any technical burden.
Challenges during the project
IVEX overcame a few challenges during this project.
First, building a proper processing pipeline to serve the purpose of extracting relevant driving scenarios from fixed sensors. For that, IVEX integrated its own perception and tracking algorithms with the outputs from perception algorithms that the customer had dockerized (no IP leak), which were also incorporated into the new generated processing pipelines.
Second, IVEX had to continuously iterate to be able to quickly show the data in IVEX cloud software to the customer and allow them to access the platform for internal inspection. It really alleviated the communication during the project and the decision making. Sharing simple links to data points with relevant findings made the engineers life easier, and they were very responsive.
Another challenge arose when generating shareable digital twins, knowing that the customer works with different simulators. With IVEX expertise in ASAM standards, generating the ASAM OpenSCENARIO XML and ASAM OpenDRIVE files was the perfect solution to be consumed by any simulator.
With ASAM standards, we are closing the loop from the real world to the Simulation, which simplifies testing relevant scenarios for our customers. We're making their data work harder, so they can work smarter
Victor Vaquero, Product & Innovation Manager of IVEX
Business benefits
The business benefits for IVEX customers were many:
Time and effort saving on expensive data recording driving campaigns:
Data recording campaigns run sensorized vehicles usually with a couple of engineers in it for several days, only for searching for specific points of interest at the time. After that, the data is commonly not used anymore. Also, as this collection is done from the ego perspective only, the number of scenarios found is limited and not enough for obtaining driving proper behaviors. IVEX solution enables customers to save time and effort in terms of data collection campaigns. They also multiply by several times the number of scenarios found, as each vehicle in the scene is a potential candidate.Flexibility and reusability of processing algorithms:
IVEX is able to quickly configure new pipelines, using existing algorithms and combining them with new ones. The flexibility of these pipelines allows IVEX customers to re-use the collected data and search for new now “unknown” scenarios in the future.Improve team collaboration, communication, efficiency and quality:
By enabling different users to easily access the data, check the findings without coding burden, and share links to specific data points with colleagues, IVEX improves customers’ internal team communication and efficiency, as well as project communication between IVEX & customer. This enabled it to iterate faster with adequate feedback and increase the results quality. It also allowed IVEX customers to really learn and understand from the data easily while gaining trust in the full process.
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