DEV Community

Cover image for How to Visualize Autonomous Driving Dataset (nuScenes)
Rerun
Rerun

Posted on • Updated on

How to Visualize Autonomous Driving Dataset (nuScenes)

Try it in browser Source Code Explore Other Examples

This example demonstrates the ability to read and visualize scenes from the nuScenes dataset, which is a public large-scale dataset specifically designed for autonomous driving. The scenes in this dataset encompass data collected from a comprehensive suite of sensors on autonomous vehicles. These include 6 cameras, 1 LIDAR, 5 RADAR, GPS and IMU sensors. Consequently, the dataset provides information about the vehicle's pose, the images captured, the recorded sensor data and the results of object detection at any given moment.

Logging and visualizing with Rerun

The visualizations in this example were created with the following Rerun code:


Sensor calibration

First, pinhole cameras and sensor poses are initialized to offer a 3D view and camera perspective. This is achieved using the Pinhole and Transform3D archetypes.

rr.log(
    f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}",
    rr.Transform3D(
        translation=calibrated_sensor["translation"],
        rotation=rr.Quaternion(xyzw=rotation_xyzw),
        from_parent=False,
    ),
    timeless=True,
)

rr.log(
    f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}",
    rr.Pinhole(
        image_from_camera=calibrated_sensor["camera_intrinsic"],
        width=sample_data["width"],
        height=sample_data["height"],
    ),
    timeless=True,
)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Timelines

All data logged using Rerun in the following sections is initially connected to a specific time. Rerun assigns a timestamp to each piece of logged data, and these timestamps are associated with timelines.

rr.set_time_seconds("timestamp", sample_data["timestamp"] * 1e-6)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Vehicle pose

As the vehicle is moving, its pose needs to be updated. Consequently, the positions of pinhole cameras and sensors must also be adjusted using Transform3D.

rr.log(
    "world/ego_vehicle",
    rr.Transform3D(
        translation=ego_pose["translation"],
        rotation=rr.Quaternion(xyzw=rotation_xyzw),
        from_parent=False,
    ),
)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

LiDAR data

LiDAR data is logged as Points3D archetype.

rr.log(f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}", rr.Points3D(points, colors=point_colors))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Camera data

Camera data is logged as encoded images using ImageEncoded.

rr.log(f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}", rr.ImageEncoded(path=data_file_path))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Radar data

Radar data is logged similar to LiDAR data, as Points3D.

rr.log(f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}", rr.Points3D(points, colors=point_colors))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Annotations

Annotations are logged as Boxes3D, containing details such as object positions, sizes, and rotation.

rr.log("world/anns", rr.Boxes3D(sizes=sizes, centers=centers, rotations=rotations, class_ids=class_ids))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Setting up the default blueprint

The default blueprint for this example is created by the following code:

sensor_space_views = [
    rrb.Spatial2DView(
        name=sensor_name,
        origin=f"world/ego_vehicle/{sensor_name}",
    )
    for sensor_name in nuscene_sensor_names(nusc, args.scene_name)
]
blueprint = rrb.Vertical(
    rrb.Spatial3DView(name="3D", origin="world"),
    rrb.Grid(*sensor_space_views),
    row_shares=[3, 2],
)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We programmatically create one view per sensor and arrange them in a grid layout, which is convenient when the number of views can significantly vary from dataset to dataset. This code also showcases the row_shares argument for vertical containers: it can be used to assign a relative size to each of the container's children. A similar column_shares argument exists for horizontal containers, while grid containers accept both.


Join us on Github

GitHub logo rerun-io / rerun

Visualize streams of multimodal data. Fast, easy to use, and simple to integrate. Built in Rust using egui.

Build time aware visualizations of multimodal data

Use the Rerun SDK (available for C++, Python and Rust) to log data like images, tensors, point clouds, and text. Logs are streamed to the Rerun Viewer for live visualization or to file for later use.

A short taste

import rerun as rr  # pip install rerun-sdk
rr.init("rerun_example_app")

rr.connect()  # Connect to a remote viewer
# rr.spawn()  # Spawn a child process with a viewer and connect
# rr.save("recording.rrd")  # Stream all logs to disk

# Associate subsequent data with 42 on the “frame” timeline
rr.set_time_sequence("frame", 42))

# Log colored 3D points to the entity at `path/to/points`
rr.log("path/to/points", rr.Points3D(positions, colors=colors
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Top comments (0)