SWEET: A Realistic Multiwavelength 3D Simulator for Automotive Perceptive Sensors in Foggy Conditions

Improving the reliability of automotive perceptive sensors in degraded weather conditions, including fog, is an important issue for road safety and the development of automated driving. Cerema has designed the PAVIN platform reproducing fog and rain conditions to evaluate optical automotive sensor performance under these conditions. In order to increase the variety of scenarios and technologies under test, the use of digital simulation becomes a major asset. The purpose of this paper is to revive the debate around the realism of the various models underlying the numerical methods. The simulation of the radiative transfer equation by Monte Carlo methods and by simplified noise models is examined. The results of this paper show some gaps in foggy scenes between the ray-tracing method, which is considered to be the most realistic, and simple models for contrast evaluation, which can have a particularly strong impact on obstacle detection algorithms.