XWOD: A Real-World Benchmark for Object Detection under Extreme Weather Conditions

TL;DR

XWOD is a comprehensive real-world benchmark dataset for object detection in extreme weather conditions, designed to improve robustness of autonomous driving systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces XWOD, a large-scale dataset covering seven extreme weather conditions and six traffic object categories, with baseline evaluations demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

YOLO detectors trained on XWOD outperform existing benchmarks significantly.

Cross-dataset tests show XWOD's data enhances weather-robust perception.

XWOD covers emerging climate hazards like flooding, tornado, and wildfire.

Abstract

Autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems remain vulnerable under extreme weather. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration reports that roughly 745,000 crashes and 3,800 fatalities per year are weather-related, and recent regulatory investigations have examined failures of Level-2/3 driving systems under reduced-visibility conditions. However, datasets commonly used to evaluate weather robustness remain limited in scale, diversity, and realism. In this paper, we introduce XWOD (Extreme Weather Object Detection), a large-scale real-world traffic-object detection benchmark containing 10,010 images and 42,924 bounding boxes across seven extreme weather conditions: rain, snow, fog, haze/sand/dust, flooding, tornado, and wildfire. The dataset covers six traffic-object categories, including car, person, truck, motorcycle, bicycle, and bus. XWOD extends the weather taxonomy from one to seven conditions, and is the first to cover the emerging class of climate-amplified hazards, such as flooding, tornado, and wildfire. To evaluate the quality of our data, we train standard YOLO-family detectors on XWOD and test them zero-shot on external weather benchmarks, achieving mAP$_{50}$ scores of 63.00% on RTTS, 59.94% on DAWN, and 61.12% on WEDGE, compared with the corresponding published YOLO-based baselines of 40.37%, 32.75%, and 45.41%, respectively, representing relative improvements of 56%, 83%, and 35%. These cross-dataset results show that XWOD provides a strong source domain for learning weather-robust traffic perception. We release the dataset, splits, baseline weights, and reproducible evaluation code under a research-use license.