Baidu open sources ApolloScape and collaborates with Berkeley DeepDrive to further machine learning in automotives

Baidu has dual announcements to make! Firstly, the launch of ApolloScape, a massive self-driving dataset for autonomous industry. Secondly, its collaboration with Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD) Industry Consortium, a research alliance exploring state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision and machine learning for automotive applications.

ApolloScape : Largest Self-driving Dataset for autonomous driving technology

The ApolloScape dataset is released under Baidu’s autonomous driving platform, Apollo. This dataset eliminates the time taken for manual data collection. Also, because it is open sourced, developers can now use ApolloScape as a base for building self-driving vehicles.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the striking features of the ApolloScape dataset:

Its data volume is 10 times greater than any other open-source autonomous driving dataset, including Kitti and CityScapes. This data could be further used for perception, simulation scenes, road networks etc., as well as enabling autonomous driving vehicles to be trained in more complex environments, weather and traffic conditions.
It defines 26 different semantic items — eg. cars, bicycles, pedestrians, buildings, streetlights, etc. — with pixel-by-pixel semantic segmentation technique.
It can also save researchers and developers a huge amount of time on real-world sensor data collection.
Beyond data, ApolloScape will also facilitate advanced research on cutting-edge simulation technology aiming to create a simulation platform that aligns with real-world experience.

Baidu’s collaboration with Berkeley DeepDrive

Prior to Baidu, Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD) Industry Consortium, has partnered with many other famous brands including, Ford, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and General Motors (GM). The key research focus of BDD include, deep reinforcement learning, cross-modal transfer learning, and clockwork FCNs for fast video processing.

This collaboration between Baidu and BDD would incorporate Apollo’s industrial resources and Berkeley’s top academic team to ramp up the innovation of theoretical research, applied technology, and commercial applications. Also, Apollo Open Platform and BDD will also jointly conduct a Workshop on Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2018 (IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) this June in Salt Lake City where they will organize task competitions based on ApolloScape.

To know more about ApolloScape, visit the official website.