LLM-Guided Transformation of Non-Critical Driving Scenes into Safety-Critical Scenarios Using Augmented Reality

Testing Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) requires realistic safety-critical scenarios, but collecting such data from real-world driving is costly and unsafe. This paper presents an automated pipeline that transforms safe driving scenes into safety-critical scenarios by combining computer vision, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Augmented Reality (AR). The system detects and tracks road users, extracts safety features including distance, velocity, motion direction, and Time-to-Collision (TTC), and assesses scene criticality. Safe scenes are modified by an LLM, which generates realistic collision-inducing objects and behaviors that are integrated into the original scene using AR. The proposed pipeline was evaluated on the nuScenes dataset, achieving 97.52% safety classification accuracy and successfully generating realistic scenarios such as pedestrian crossings, rear overtaking vehicles, and sudden-stop events. The results demonstrate an effective and flexible approach for automated generation of safety-critical scenarios to support the testing and validation of autonomous driving systems.