Performance Degradation of Object Detection Neural Networks Under Natural Visual Contamination in Autonomous Driving

The operation of driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles requires a sensor system and a control algorithm. Sensors provide information to detect people, vehicles and objects in the vehicle’s environment; however, their performance can be degraded by adverse environmental conditions and contamination. This literature review identified factors that reduce sensor visibility, such as weather conditions and external contamination. In this study, the detection efficiency of state-of-the-art neural network-based object detectors was examined in a simulation environment using a synthetic dataset. A custom dataset comprising six urban and suburban traffic scenarios was created, including clean images and ten contaminated variants per scene with increasing mud coverage. The results show that contamination leads to a measurable reduction in detection performance across all models. Smaller variants are more sensitive to degradation, while medium-complexity models provide a favorable balance between robustness and computational cost. Increasing model size yields limited additional robustness, and performance differences between architectures highlight the importance of model design. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of contamination, particularly near the image center, has a significant impact on performance in addition to its overall extent.