# Segment-Level Road Obstacle Detection Using Visual Foundation Model Priors and Likelihood Ratios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Neural Spline Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04032/) (2019)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [SPot-the-Difference Self-Supervised Pre-training for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14315/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07998/) (2021)
- [To Trust Or Not To Trust A Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11783/) (2018)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [SegmentMeIfYouCan: A Benchmark for Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14812/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Bayesian Deep Learning Methods for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12709/) (2018)
- [Open-Vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation with MaskCLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08984/) (2022)
- [Lost and Found: Detecting Small Road Hazards for Self-Driving Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04653/) (2016)
- [Pixel-wise Anomaly Detection in Complex Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05445/) (2021)
- [Pixel-wise Energy-biased Abstention Learning for Anomaly Segmentation on Complex Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12264/) (2021)
- [RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14293/) (2022)
- [Unmasking Anomalies in Road-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13316/) (2023)
- [On Advantages of Mask-level Recognition for Outlier-aware Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03407/) (2023)
- [Maskomaly:Zero-Shot Mask Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16972/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Out-of-Distribution Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: Problems and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08695/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Neural Networks for Intelligent Data-Driven Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10603/) (2025)
- [From Pixel to Mask: A Survey of Out-of-Distribution Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10309/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting road obstacles is essential for autonomous vehicles to navigate dynamic and complex traffic environments safely. Current road obstacle detection methods typically assign a score to each pixel and apply a threshold to generate final predictions. However, selecting an appropriate threshold is challenging, and the per-pixel classification approach often leads to fragmented predictions with numerous false positives. In this work, we propose a novel method that leverages segment-level features from visual foundation models and likelihood ratios to predict road obstacles directly. By focusing on segments rather than individual pixels, our approach enhances detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and offers increased robustness to scene variability. We benchmark our approach against existing methods on the RoadObstacle and LostAndFound datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance without needing a predefined threshold.