# Lost and Found: Detecting Small Road Hazards for Self-Driving Vehicles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04653 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04653/

## Key facts

- Cited by 117 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 117)

- [SegmentMeIfYouCan: A Benchmark for Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14812/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Object Detection to Common Corruptions in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11040/) (2023)
- [Pixel-wise Anomaly Detection in Complex Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05445/) (2021)
- [CODA: A Real-World Road Corner Case Dataset for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07724/) (2022)
- [GMMSeg: Gaussian Mixture based Generative Semantic Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02025/) (2022)
- [Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09042/) (2025)
- [Pixel-wise Energy-biased Abstention Learning for Anomaly Segmentation on Complex Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12264/) (2021)
- [Standardized Max Logits: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Identifying Unexpected Road Obstacles in Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11264/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23757/) (2025)
- [Residual Pattern Learning for Pixel-wise Out-of-Distribution Detection in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14512/) (2022)
- [Deep Metric Learning for Open World Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04562/) (2021)
- [Unmasking Anomalies in Road-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13316/) (2023)
- [DenseHybrid: Hybrid Anomaly Detection for Dense Open-set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02606/) (2022)
- [An Application-Driven Conceptualization of Corner Cases for Perception in Highly Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03678/) (2021)
- [Corner Cases for Visual Perception in Automated Driving: Some Guidance on Detection Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05897/) (2021)
- [MUAD: Multiple Uncertainties for Autonomous Driving, a benchmark for multiple uncertainty types and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01437/) (2022)
- [Reliability in Semantic Segmentation: Can We Use Synthetic Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09231/) (2023)
- [Unknown Sniffer for Object Detection: Don't Turn a Blind Eye to Unknown Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13769/) (2023)
- [Open-sourced Data Ecosystem in Autonomous Driving: the Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03408/) (2023)
- [Segment Every Out-of-Distribution Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16516/) (2023)
- [PixOOD: Pixel-Level Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19882/) (2024)
- [Two Video Data Sets for Tracking and Retrieval of Out of Distribution Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02074/) (2022)
- [Mask2Anomaly: Mask Transformer for Universal Open-set Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04573/) (2023)
- [Dense outlier detection and open-set recognition based on training with noisy negative images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09193/) (2021)
- [Perception Datasets for Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02790/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Open-Ended Object Detection and Segmentation via Attention as Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05963/) (2024)
- [UGainS: Uncertainty Guided Anomaly Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02046/) (2023)
- [CSL: Class-Agnostic Structure-Constrained Learning for Segmentation Including the Unseen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05538/) (2023)
- [A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12926/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting small obstacles on the road ahead is a critical part of the driving task which has to be mastered by fully autonomous cars. In this paper, we present a method based on stereo vision to reliably detect such obstacles from a moving vehicle. The proposed algorithm performs statistical hypothesis tests in disparity space directly on stereo image data, assessing freespace and obstacle hypotheses on independent local patches. This detection approach does not depend on a global road model and handles both static and moving obstacles. For evaluation, we employ a novel lost-cargo image sequence dataset comprising more than two thousand frames with pixelwise annotations of obstacle and free-space and provide a thorough comparison to several stereo-based baseline methods. The dataset will be made available to the community to foster further research on this important topic. The proposed approach outperforms all considered baselines in our evaluations on both pixel and object level and runs at frame rates of up to 20 Hz on 2 mega-pixel stereo imagery. Small obstacles down to the height of 5 cm can successfully be detected at 20 m distance at low false positive rates.