SynSHRP2: A Synthetic Multimodal Benchmark for Driving Safety-critical Events Derived from Real-world Driving Data

TL;DR

SynSHRP2 is a synthetic, multimodal driving dataset derived from real-world data, designed to facilitate safety research while protecting privacy, and includes detailed annotations and benchmarks for event classification and scene understanding.

Contribution

This work introduces SynSHRP2, a novel synthetic dataset that overcomes privacy and accessibility issues of real-world driving data, enabling safer and more effective safety-critical event research.

Findings

Successfully generated a large synthetic dataset with over 1874 crashes and 6924 near-crashes.

Provided benchmarks for event classification and scene understanding tasks.

Demonstrated the dataset's utility in safety research and automated driving system development.

Abstract

Driving-related safety-critical events (SCEs), including crashes and near-crashes, provide essential insights for the development and safety evaluation of automated driving systems. However, two major challenges limit their accessibility: the rarity of SCEs and the presence of sensitive privacy information in the data. The Second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS), the largest NDS to date, collected millions of hours of multimodal, high-resolution, high-frequency driving data from thousands of participants, capturing thousands of SCEs. While this dataset is invaluable for safety research, privacy concerns and data use restrictions significantly limit public access to the raw data. To address these challenges, we introduce SynSHRP2, a publicly available, synthetic, multimodal driving dataset containing over 1874 crashes and 6924 near-crashes derived from the SHRP 2 NDS. The dataset features de-identified keyframes generated using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, ensuring the preservation of critical safety-related information while eliminating personally identifiable data. Additionally, SynSHRP2 includes detailed annotations on SCE type, environmental and traffic conditions, and time-series kinematic data spanning 5 seconds before and during each event. Synchronized keyframes and narrative descriptions further enhance its usability. This paper presents two benchmarks for event attribute classification and scene understanding, demonstrating the potential applications of SynSHRP2 in advancing safety research and automated driving system development.