BMD-45: A Large-Scale CCTV Vehicle Detection Dataset for Urban Traffic in Developing Cities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sharma, Akash, Mhatre, Chinmay, Gawali, Sankalp, Bokkasam, Ruthvik, Sharma, Brij, Pattanaik, Vishwajeet, Rathore, Punit, Krishnapuram, Raghu, Kovvali, Vijay Gopal, Chakraborty, Anirban, Simmhan, Yogesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sharma, Akash
Mhatre, Chinmay
Gawali, Sankalp
Bokkasam, Ruthvik
Sharma, Brij
Pattanaik, Vishwajeet
Rathore, Punit
Krishnapuram, Raghu
Kovvali, Vijay Gopal
Chakraborty, Anirban
Simmhan, Yogesh
author_facet Sharma, Akash
Mhatre, Chinmay
Gawali, Sankalp
Bokkasam, Ruthvik
Sharma, Brij
Pattanaik, Vishwajeet
Rathore, Punit
Krishnapuram, Raghu
Kovvali, Vijay Gopal
Chakraborty, Anirban
Simmhan, Yogesh
contents Robust vehicle detection from fixed CCTV cameras is critical for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Yet existing benchmarks predominantly feature relatively homogeneous, highly organized traffic patterns captured from ego-centric driving perspectives or controlled aerial views. This regional and sensor view bias creates a significant gap. Models trained on datasets such as UA-DETRAC and COCO struggle to generalize to the dense, heterogeneous, disorganized traffic conditions observed in rapidly developing urban centers in emerging economies. To address this limitation, we introduce BMD-45, a large-scale dataset comprising 480K bounding boxes annotated over 45K images captured from over 3.6K operational Safe City CCTV cameras. BMD-45 contains 14 fine-grained vehicle categories, including region-specific modes such as auto-rickshaws and tempo travellers, which are not present in existing benchmarks. The dataset captures real-world deployment challenges, including extreme viewpoint variation, occlusion, and vehicle density . We establish comprehensive baselines using state-of-the-art detectors and reveal a striking domain gap: models fine-tuned on UA-DETRAC achieve only 33.6% mAP@0.50:0.95, compared to 83.8% when trained in-domain on BMD-45, representing a 2.5x improvement that persists even when accounting for novel vehicle classes. This performance gap underscores the critical need for geographically diverse traffic benchmarks and establishes BMD-45 as a baseline for developing robust perception systems in underrepresented urban environments worldwide. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/iisc-aim/BMD-45.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BMD-45: A Large-Scale CCTV Vehicle Detection Dataset for Urban Traffic in Developing Cities
Sharma, Akash
Mhatre, Chinmay
Gawali, Sankalp
Bokkasam, Ruthvik
Sharma, Brij
Pattanaik, Vishwajeet
Rathore, Punit
Krishnapuram, Raghu
Kovvali, Vijay Gopal
Chakraborty, Anirban
Simmhan, Yogesh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robust vehicle detection from fixed CCTV cameras is critical for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Yet existing benchmarks predominantly feature relatively homogeneous, highly organized traffic patterns captured from ego-centric driving perspectives or controlled aerial views. This regional and sensor view bias creates a significant gap. Models trained on datasets such as UA-DETRAC and COCO struggle to generalize to the dense, heterogeneous, disorganized traffic conditions observed in rapidly developing urban centers in emerging economies. To address this limitation, we introduce BMD-45, a large-scale dataset comprising 480K bounding boxes annotated over 45K images captured from over 3.6K operational Safe City CCTV cameras. BMD-45 contains 14 fine-grained vehicle categories, including region-specific modes such as auto-rickshaws and tempo travellers, which are not present in existing benchmarks. The dataset captures real-world deployment challenges, including extreme viewpoint variation, occlusion, and vehicle density . We establish comprehensive baselines using state-of-the-art detectors and reveal a striking domain gap: models fine-tuned on UA-DETRAC achieve only 33.6% mAP@0.50:0.95, compared to 83.8% when trained in-domain on BMD-45, representing a 2.5x improvement that persists even when accounting for novel vehicle classes. This performance gap underscores the critical need for geographically diverse traffic benchmarks and establishes BMD-45 as a baseline for developing robust perception systems in underrepresented urban environments worldwide. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/iisc-aim/BMD-45.
title BMD-45: A Large-Scale CCTV Vehicle Detection Dataset for Urban Traffic in Developing Cities
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24419