The Road Ahead in Autonomous Driving: The KITScenes Multimodal Dataset

Existing autonomous driving datasets have enabled major progress, but fall short in sensor fidelity, map completeness, or geographic diversity. We present KITScenes Multimodal, a European dataset built around high-fidelity sensors and maps. Our fully synchronized sensor suite combines high-resolution global-shutter cameras, long-range lidar beyond 400m, 4D imaging radar, and redundant GNSS/INS localization. Our HD maps are, to our knowledge, the most complete of any sensor dataset, validated through autonomous driving trials on open-source software. For the first time in a public dataset, all driving-relevant traffic elements, such as traffic lights, are mapped in 3D to a reprojection-accurate level with full topological connectivity. Recorded in cities with irregular street layouts and mixed traffic modes, our dataset complements existing datasets by broadening the available geographic diversity. We also introduce four benchmarks, each advancing spatial learning for embodied AI: online HD map construction, long-range depth estimation, novel view synthesis, and end-to-end driving. Project page: https://kitscenes.com/

Railway Artificial Intelligence Learning Benchmark (RAIL-BENCH): A Benchmark Suite for Perception in the Railway Domain

Automated train operation on existing railway infrastructure requires robust camera-based perception, yet the railway domain lacks public benchmark suites with standardized evaluation protocols that would enable reproducible comparison of approaches. We present RAIL-BENCH, the first perception benchmark suite for the railway domain. It comprises five challenges - rail track detection, object detection, vegetation segmentation, multi-object tracking, and monocular visual odometry - each tailored to the specific characteristics of railway environments. RAIL-BENCH provides curated training and test datasets drawn from diverse real-world scenarios, evaluation metrics, and public scoreboards (https://www.mrt.kit.edu/railbench). For the rail track detection challenge we introduce LineAP, a novel segment-based average precision metric that evaluates the geometric accuracy of polyline predictions independently of instance-level grouping, addressing key limitations of existing line detection metrics.