Robustness Benchmark Evaluation and Optimization for Real-Time Vehicle Detection Under Multiple Adverse Conditions

This paper presents a robustness benchmark evaluation and optimization for vehicle detection. Real-time vehicle detection has become an essential means of data perception in the transportation field, covering various aspects such as intelligent transportation systems, video surveillance, and autonomous driving. However, evaluating and optimizing the robustness of vehicle detection in real traffic scenarios remains challenging. When data distributions change, such as the impact of adverse weather or sensor damages, model reliability cannot be guaranteed. We first conducted a large-scale robustness benchmark evaluation for vehicle detection. Analysis revealed that adverse weather, motion, and occlusion are the most detrimental factors to vehicle detection performance. The impact of color changes and noise, while present, is relatively less pronounced. Moreover, the robustness of vehicle detection is closely linked to its baseline performance and model size. And as the severity of corruption intensifies, the performance of models experiences a sharp drop. When the data distribution of images changes, the features of the vehicles that the model focuses on are weakened, making the activation level of the targets significantly reduced. By evaluation, we provided guidance and direction for optimizing detection robustness. Based on these findings, we propose TDIRM, a traffic-degraded image restoration model based on stable diffusion, designed to efficiently restore degraded images in real traffic scenarios and thereby enhance the robustness of vehicle detection. The model introduces an image semantics encoder (ISE) module to extract features that align with the latent description of the real background while excluding degradation-related information. Additionally, a triple control embedding attention (TCE) module is proposed to fully integrate all condition controls. Through a triple condition control mechanism, TDIRM achieves restoration results with high fidelity and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that TDIRM improves vehicle detection mAP by 6.92% on real dense fog data, especially for small distant vehicles that were severely obscured by fog. By enabling semantic-structural-content collaborative optimization within the diffusion framework, TDIRM establishes a novel paradigm for traffic scene image restoration.