English

OSDaR-AR: Enhancing Railway Perception Datasets via Multi-modal Augmented Reality

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-27 v1

Abstract

Although deep learning has significantly advanced the perception capabilities of intelligent transportation systems, railway applications continue to suffer from a scarcity of high-quality, annotated data for safety-critical tasks like obstacle detection. While photorealistic simulators offer a solution, they often struggle with the ``sim-to-real" gap; conversely, simple image-masking techniques lack the spatio-temporal coherence required to obtain augmented single- and multi-frame scenes with the correct appearance and dimensions. This paper introduces a multi-modal augmented reality framework designed to bridge this gap by integrating photorealistic virtual objects into real-world railway sequences from the OSDaR23 dataset. Utilizing Unreal Engine 5 features, our pipeline leverages LiDAR point-clouds and INS/GNSS data to ensure accurate object placement and temporal stability across RGB frames. This paper also proposes a segmentation-based refinement strategy for INS/GNSS data to significantly improve the realism of the augmented sequences, as confirmed by the comparative study presented in the paper. Carefully designed augmented sequences are collected to produce OSDaR-AR, a public dataset designed to support the development of next-generation railway perception systems. The dataset is available at the following page: https://syndra.retis.santannapisa.it/osdarar.html

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22920,
  title  = {OSDaR-AR: Enhancing Railway Perception Datasets via Multi-modal Augmented Reality},
  author = {Federico Nesti and Gianluca D'Amico and Mauro Marinoni and Giorgio Buttazzo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22920},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:53:47.660Z