TrafficNight: An Aerial Multimodal Benchmark for Nighttime Vehicle Surveillance

In autonomous simulation and surveillance, realistic scenarios are crucial for advancing object detection algorithms. Existing aerial datasets suffer from sample class imbalance, especially in larger vehicles like trucks, and unrealistic lighting conditions. This hampers progress in driving behavior analysis and imitation. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel multimodal vehicle surveillance dataset, integrating aerial thermal infrared and sRGB imagery. It contributes: (1) A novel thermal infrared vehicle detection benchmark, ensuring robust object detection in nighttime lighting conditions. (2) Thermal infrared surveillance videos paired with corresponding HD-MAPs for improved multi-vehicle tracking. (3) Specialized annotations for semi-trailers, precisely documenting their movement trajectories and physical coordinates. TrafficNight significantly advances understanding of larger vehicles in traffic dynamics, serving as a benchmark for enhancing Autopilot systems and traffic surveillance in challenging environments (See TrafficNight project webpage for the code and more).