Simulating Refractive Distortions and Weather-Induced Artifacts for Resource-Constrained Autonomous Perception

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Mots'oehli, Moseli, Chen, Feimei, Chan, Hok Wai, Tlali, Itumeleng, Babeli, Thulani, Baek, Kyungim, Chen, Huaijin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866916831888932864
author Mots'oehli, Moseli
Chen, Feimei
Chan, Hok Wai
Tlali, Itumeleng
Babeli, Thulani
Baek, Kyungim
Chen, Huaijin
author_facet Mots'oehli, Moseli
Chen, Feimei
Chan, Hok Wai
Tlali, Itumeleng
Babeli, Thulani
Baek, Kyungim
Chen, Huaijin
contents The scarcity of autonomous vehicle datasets from developing regions, particularly across Africa's diverse urban, rural, and unpaved roads, remains a key obstacle to robust perception in low-resource settings. We present a procedural augmentation pipeline that enhances low-cost monocular dashcam footage with realistic refractive distortions and weather-induced artifacts tailored to challenging African driving scenarios. Our refractive module simulates optical effects from low-quality lenses and air turbulence, including lens distortion, Perlin noise, Thin-Plate Spline (TPS), and divergence-free (incompressible) warps. The weather module adds homogeneous fog, heterogeneous fog, and lens flare. To establish a benchmark, we provide baseline performance using three image restoration models. To support perception research in underrepresented African contexts, without costly data collection, labeling, or simulation, we release our distortion toolkit, augmented dataset splits, and benchmark results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating Refractive Distortions and Weather-Induced Artifacts for Resource-Constrained Autonomous Perception
Mots'oehli, Moseli
Chen, Feimei
Chan, Hok Wai
Tlali, Itumeleng
Babeli, Thulani
Baek, Kyungim
Chen, Huaijin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
The scarcity of autonomous vehicle datasets from developing regions, particularly across Africa's diverse urban, rural, and unpaved roads, remains a key obstacle to robust perception in low-resource settings. We present a procedural augmentation pipeline that enhances low-cost monocular dashcam footage with realistic refractive distortions and weather-induced artifacts tailored to challenging African driving scenarios. Our refractive module simulates optical effects from low-quality lenses and air turbulence, including lens distortion, Perlin noise, Thin-Plate Spline (TPS), and divergence-free (incompressible) warps. The weather module adds homogeneous fog, heterogeneous fog, and lens flare. To establish a benchmark, we provide baseline performance using three image restoration models. To support perception research in underrepresented African contexts, without costly data collection, labeling, or simulation, we release our distortion toolkit, augmented dataset splits, and benchmark results.
title Simulating Refractive Distortions and Weather-Induced Artifacts for Resource-Constrained Autonomous Perception
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05536