Estimating Complexity for Perception-based ADAS in Unstructured Road Environments

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are rapidly becoming a standard feature in modern road vehicles, enhancing safety and driver comfort. As ADAS adoption expands across diverse geographical and cultural regions, the performance of camera-based perception systems may vary significantly due to environmental and expected social behaviour of the different actors. This paper explores the referred factors and evaluates the traffic environment complexity for vehicles with different levels of automation. In particular, we propose a novel modeling and quantitative assessment approach for environment complexity. Specifically, we compare a perception model trained on United States dataset with a dataset from India, a nation characterized by unique traffic patterns, signage conventions, and cultural norms to assess its performance variation, and to lay the basis for proposing influencing factors of traffic environment complexity. We establish a scheme of referential and additional static factors and based on an expert evaluation, environment complexity is established. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is testified by naturalistic driving data. These findings pave the way for future research in intelligent driving and emphasize the importance of addressing cultural nuances as vehicle automation levels increase.