# SynTraC: A Synthetic Dataset for Traffic Signal Control from Traffic Monitoring Cameras

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09588 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09588/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [CityFlow: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Large Scale City Traffic Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05217/) (2019)
- [Learning Phase Competition for Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04722/) (2019)
- [LibSignal: An Open Library for Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10649/) (2022)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning for Road Traffic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02381/) (2022)
- [CityFlowER: An Efficient and Realistic Traffic Simulator with Embedded Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06127/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Generative AI in Transportation Planning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07158/) (2025)
- [VLMLight: Safety-Critical Traffic Signal Control via Vision-Language Meta-Control and Dual-Branch Reasoning Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19486/) (2025)
- [MC-BEVRO: Multi-Camera Bird Eye View Road Occupancy Detection for Traffic Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11287/) (2025)
- [R3ST: A Synthetic 3D Dataset With Realistic Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16784/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces SynTraC, the first public image-based traffic signal control dataset, aimed at bridging the gap between simulated environments and real-world traffic management challenges. Unlike traditional datasets for traffic signal control which aim to provide simplified feature vectors like vehicle counts from traffic simulators, SynTraC provides real-style images from the CARLA simulator with annotated features, along with traffic signal states. This image-based dataset comes with diverse real-world scenarios, including varying weather and times of day. Additionally, SynTraC also provides different reward values for advanced traffic signal control algorithms like reinforcement learning. Experiments with SynTraC demonstrate that it is still an open challenge to image-based traffic signal control methods compared with feature-based control methods, indicating our dataset can further guide the development of future algorithms. The code for this paper can be found in urlhttps://github.com/DaRL-LibSignal/SynTraC.SynTraC