DarkDriving: A Real-World Day and Night Aligned Dataset for Autonomous Driving in the Dark Environment

TL;DR

DarkDriving introduces a novel, precisely aligned day-night dataset for autonomous driving in low-light conditions, enabling improved evaluation and development of perception systems in dark environments.

Contribution

This paper presents the first real-world day-night aligned dataset for autonomous driving in dark environments, created using a novel automatic trajectory tracking method in a large test field.

Findings

The dataset contains 9,538 aligned image pairs with centimeter-level accuracy.

DarkDriving enables evaluation of low-light enhancement and detection tasks in autonomous driving.

Experimental results demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness for benchmarking and improving perception in low-light conditions.

Abstract

The low-light conditions are challenging to the vision-centric perception systems for autonomous driving in the dark environment. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark dataset (named DarkDriving) to investigate the low-light enhancement for autonomous driving. The existing real-world low-light enhancement benchmark datasets can be collected by controlling various exposures only in small-ranges and static scenes. The dark images of the current nighttime driving datasets do not have the precisely aligned daytime counterparts. The extreme difficulty to collect a real-world day and night aligned dataset in the dynamic driving scenes significantly limited the research in this area. With a proposed automatic day-night Trajectory Tracking based Pose Matching (TTPM) method in a large real-world closed driving test field (area: 69 acres), we collected the first real-world day and night aligned dataset for autonomous driving in the dark environment. The DarkDriving dataset has 9,538 day and night image pairs precisely aligned in location and spatial contents, whose alignment error is in just several centimeters. For each pair, we also manually label the object 2D bounding boxes. DarkDriving introduces four perception related tasks, including low-light enhancement, generalized low-light enhancement, and low-light enhancement for 2D detection and 3D detection of autonomous driving in the dark environment. The experimental results show that our DarkDriving dataset provides a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating low-light enhancement for autonomous driving and it can also be generalized to enhance dark images and promote detection in some other low-light driving environment, such as nuScenes.The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/DriveMindLab/DarkDriving-ICRA-2026.