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Tracking the Invisible: Self-Supervised Wheel Track Detection with Thermal-RGB Fusion

2026-10-09 17:21:28
Yiming Yang, Jeremy P. Bos

Abstract

Accurate detection of drivable area is essential for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. While state-of-the-art methods focus on general traversability estimation, they prove inadequate for snow-covered roads where following existing wheel tracks offers crucial advantages: improved traction, predictable vehicle dynamics, and verified path stability. To address this, we propose a low-cost, self-supervised approach detecting safety-critical wheel tracks using synchronized RGB-I (RGB + Long-Wave Infrared) imagery. Our method automatically generates training labels by projecting future wheel trajectories from recorded GNSS data. A neural network is designed to identify wheel tracks with the 4-channel RGB-I images from challenging, white-out road surfaces. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in visually monotonous and featureless adverse environment, offering a robust and cost-effective alternative for winter autonomy. The newly introduced ThermalTrack dataset is available at: this https URL.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13872

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.13872.pdf


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