SOLAS: Superpositioning an Optical Lens in Automotive Simulation

TL;DR

The problem addressed is the lack of realistic lens-induced artifacts in automotive simulation, which hampers perception-system training. The method leverages KrakenOS, an open-source Python ray-tracer, to construct PSF grids for an optical doublet and convolve them with synthetic fisheye images over $\pm 2$ FOV and RGB wavelengths $w=(656\text{ nm},531\text{ nm},486\text{ nm})$, with PSF outputs benchmarked against Ansys Zemax OpticStudio showing $RMSE\approx 0.02$. The contributions include (i) a performance comparison between KrakenOS and Zemax, (ii) a novel degradation pipeline for SynWoodscape and Parallel Domain Woodscape, (iii) analysis of spatially varying optical artifacts and nonuniform blur, and (iv) ISO12233 Slanted Edge-based sharpness measurements. The work demonstrates a cost-effective, reproducible approach to injecting realistic lens artifacts into automotive simulations, enabling more robust perception-system development.

Abstract

Automotive Simulation is a potentially cost-effective strategy to identify and test corner case scenarios in automotive perception. Recent work has shown a significant shift in creating realistic synthetic data for road traffic scenarios using a video graphics engine. However, a gap exists in modeling realistic optical aberrations associated with cameras in automotive simulation. This paper builds on the concept from existing literature to model optical degradations in simulated environments using the Python-based ray-tracing library KrakenOS. As a novel pipeline, we degrade automotive fisheye simulation using an optical doublet with +/-2 deg Field of View (FOV), introducing realistic optical artifacts into two simulation images from SynWoodscape and Parallel Domain Woodscape. We evaluate KrakenOS by calculating the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), which averaged around 0.023 across the RGB light spectrum compared to Ansys Zemax OpticStudio, an industrial benchmark for optical design and simulation. Lastly, we measure the image sharpness of the degraded simulation using the ISO12233:2023 Slanted Edge Method and show how both qualitative and measured results indicate the extent of the spatial variation in image sharpness from the periphery to the center of the degradations.