A Graph-based Framework for Coverage Analysis in Autonomous Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Muehlenstädt, Thomas, Bause, Marius
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866915767056859136
author Muehlenstädt, Thomas
Bause, Marius
author_facet Muehlenstädt, Thomas
Bause, Marius
contents Coverage analysis is essential for validating the safety of autonomous driving systems, yet existing approaches typically assess coverage factors individually or in limited combinations, struggling to capture the complex interactions inherent in traffic scenes. This paper proposes a graph-based framework for coverage analysis that represents traffic scenes as hierarchical graphs, combining map topology with actor relationships. The framework introduces a two-phase graph construction algorithm that systematically captures spatial relationships between traffic participants, including leading, following, neighboring, and opposing configurations. Two complementary coverage analysis methods are presented. First, a sub-graph isomorphism approach matches traffic scenes against a set of manually defined archetype graphs representing common driving scenarios. Second, a graph embedding approach utilizes Graph Isomorphism Networks with Edge features (GINE) trained via self-supervised contrastive learning to project traffic scenes into a vector space, enabling similarity-based coverage assessment. The framework is validated on both real-world data from the Argoverse 2.0 dataset and synthetic data from the CARLA simulator. The subgraph isomorphism method is used to calculate node coverage percentages using predefined archetypes, while the embedding approach reveals meaningful structure in the latent space suitable for clustering and anomaly detection. The proposed approach offers significant advantages over traditional methods by scaling efficiently to diverse traffic scenarios without requiring scenario-specific handling, and by naturally accommodating varying numbers of actors in a scene.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Graph-based Framework for Coverage Analysis in Autonomous Driving
Muehlenstädt, Thomas
Bause, Marius
Methodology
05C85, 68T07
Coverage analysis is essential for validating the safety of autonomous driving systems, yet existing approaches typically assess coverage factors individually or in limited combinations, struggling to capture the complex interactions inherent in traffic scenes. This paper proposes a graph-based framework for coverage analysis that represents traffic scenes as hierarchical graphs, combining map topology with actor relationships. The framework introduces a two-phase graph construction algorithm that systematically captures spatial relationships between traffic participants, including leading, following, neighboring, and opposing configurations. Two complementary coverage analysis methods are presented. First, a sub-graph isomorphism approach matches traffic scenes against a set of manually defined archetype graphs representing common driving scenarios. Second, a graph embedding approach utilizes Graph Isomorphism Networks with Edge features (GINE) trained via self-supervised contrastive learning to project traffic scenes into a vector space, enabling similarity-based coverage assessment. The framework is validated on both real-world data from the Argoverse 2.0 dataset and synthetic data from the CARLA simulator. The subgraph isomorphism method is used to calculate node coverage percentages using predefined archetypes, while the embedding approach reveals meaningful structure in the latent space suitable for clustering and anomaly detection. The proposed approach offers significant advantages over traditional methods by scaling efficiently to diverse traffic scenarios without requiring scenario-specific handling, and by naturally accommodating varying numbers of actors in a scene.
title A Graph-based Framework for Coverage Analysis in Autonomous Driving
topic Methodology
05C85, 68T07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00903