WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmarks for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivor rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct benchmark experiments on the uni-modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io.

I. Introduction

Autonomous driving techniques are developing rapidly in recent years, achieving safer, more efficient, and more sustainable transportation across roads, skies, and water surfaces [1], [2], [3]. Different scenarios offer unique prospects and challenges for autonomous driving vehicles. Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that navigate on water surfaces offer a versatile and cost-effective solution for various tasks, including coastal surveillance, environmental monitoring, river modeling, underwater detection, river rescue, and waste cleaning [4], [5], [6], [7].