From Leaderboard to Deployment: Code Quality Challenges in AV Perception Repositories

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes 178 AV perception repositories, revealing that most do not meet production standards and highlighting the need for improved code quality and safety practices for real-world deployment.

Contribution

First large-scale empirical analysis of code quality in AV perception repositories, identifying gaps between research benchmarks and production readiness.

Findings

Only 7.3% of repositories meet basic production criteria.

Security issues are concentrated in top five vulnerabilities.

CI/CD adoption correlates with better maintainability.

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle (AV) perception models are typically evaluated solely on benchmark performance metrics, with limited attention to code quality, production readiness and long-term maintainability. This creates a significant gap between research excellence and real-world deployment in safety-critical systems subject to international safety standards. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale empirical study of software quality in AV perception repositories, systematically analyzing 178 unique models from the KITTI and NuScenes 3D Object Detection leaderboards. Using static analysis tools (Pylint, Bandit, and Radon), we evaluated code errors, security vulnerabilities, maintainability, and development practices. Our findings revealed that only 7.3% of the studied repositories meet basic production-readiness criteria, defined as having zero critical errors and no high-severity security vulnerabilities. Security issues are highly concentrated, with the top five issues responsible for almost 80% of occurrences, which prompted us to develop a set of actionable guidelines to prevent them. Additionally, the adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines was correlated with better code maintainability. Our findings highlight that leaderboard performance does not reflect production readiness and that targeted interventions could substantially improve the quality and safety of AV perception code.