NYC3DCars: A Dataset of 3D Vehicles in Geographic Context

Kevin Matzen, Noah Snavely; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 761-768

Geometry and geography can play an important role in recognition tasks in computer vision. To aid in studying connections between geometry and recognition, we introduce NYC3DCars, a rich dataset for vehicle detection in urban scenes built from Internet photos drawn from the wild, focused on densely trafficked areas of New York City. Our dataset is augmented with detailed geometric and geographic information, including full camera poses derived from structure from motion, 3D vehicle annotations, and geographic information from open resources, including road segmentations and directions of travel. NYC3DCars can be used to study new questions about using geometric information in detection tasks, and to explore applications of Internet photos in understanding cities. To demonstrate the utility of our data, we evaluate the use of the geographic information in our dataset to enhance a parts-based detection method, and suggest other avenues for future exploration.