ERF: A Benchmark Dataset for Robust Semantic Segmentation Under Extreme Rainfall Conditions

As climate change reshapes global weather patterns, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events have amplified the safety imperatives for autonomous driving systems. During such events, rainfall can escalate from heavy to violent, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization, severely impairing images with diverse and significant degradations. Many existing semantic segmentation models perform well under light to heavy rain, but there is a notable absence of datasets addressing violent rain conditions for these models to validate and learn from. In this paper, we introduce the Extreme RainFall (ERF) dataset for semantic segmentation in both image and video tasks under violent rain conditions. Our dataset comprises 14,757 unlabeled frames and 100 labeled frames, all captured during four different violent rainfall periods. We use our dataset to evaluate the robustness of various methods against violent rainfall, focusing on four approaches: 1) image-based foundation models, 2) image-based domain generalization methods, 3) image-based domain adaptation methods, and 4) video-based methods. The results reveal that none of the existing models tested is capable of withstanding the extreme challenges posed by violent rainfall conditions. By analyzing the results, we offer insights and suggestions for developing more robust models under extreme rainfall events.