VALERIE22 -- A photorealistic, richly metadata annotated dataset of urban environments

The VALERIE tool pipeline is a synthetic data generator developed with the goal to contribute to the understanding of domain-specific factors that influence perception performance of DNNs (deep neural networks). This work was carried out under the German research project KI Absicherung in order to develop a methodology for the validation of DNNs in the context of pedestrian detection in urban environments for automated driving. The VALERIE22 dataset was generated with the VALERIE procedural tools pipeline providing a photorealistic sensor simulation rendered from automatically synthesized scenes. The dataset provides a uniquely rich set of metadata, allowing extraction of specific scene and semantic features (like pixel-accurate occlusion rates, positions in the scene and distance + angle to the camera). This enables a multitude of possible tests on the data and we hope to stimulate research on understanding performance of DNNs. Based on performance metric a comparison with several other publicly available datasets is provided, demonstrating that VALERIE22 is one of best performing synthetic datasets currently available in the open domain.