GLARE: A Dataset for Traffic Sign Detection in Sun Glare

Real-time machine learning object detection algorithms are often found within autonomous vehicle technology and depend on quality datasets. It is essential that these algorithms work correctly in everyday conditions as well as under strong sun glare. Reports indicate glare is one of the two most prominent environment-related reasons for crashes. However, existing datasets, such as the Laboratory for Intelligent & Safe Automobiles Traffic Sign (LISA) Dataset and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark, do not reflect the existence of sun glare at all. This paper presents the GLARE (GLARE is available at: https://github.com/NicholasCG/GLARE_Dataset) traffic sign dataset: a collection of images with U.S-based traffic signs under heavy visual interference by sunlight. GLARE contains 2,157 images of traffic signs with sun glare, pulled from 33 videos of dashcam footage of roads in the United States. It provides an essential enrichment to the widely used LISA Traffic Sign dataset. Our experimental study shows that although several state-of-the-art baseline architectures have demonstrated good performance on traffic sign detection in conditions without sun glare in the past, they performed poorly when tested against GLARE (e.g., average mAP _{0.5:0.95} of 19.4). We also notice that current architectures have better detection when trained on images of traffic signs in sun glare performance (e.g., average mAP _{0.5:0.95} of 39.6), and perform best when trained on a mixture of conditions (e.g., average mAP _{0.5:0.95} of 42.3).