Luminar Technologies, Inc., a provider of automotive lidar hardware and software technology, and Volvo Cars released a curated dataset called Cirrus containing unique long range lidar data from Volvo Cars’ test and data collection fleet. This curated dataset is being opened to industry developers and researchers in order to aid and further advancements for safe self-driving.

The Cirrus dataset contains 6,285 pairs of RGB, lidar Gaussian, and lidar Uniform frames. Cirrus has been annotated for eight object categories across the entire 250-meter lidar effective range. It includes both high-speed highway and low-speed urban-road scenarios. All images have gone through an anonymization process blurring faces and license plates to eliminate personally identifiable information.

Cirrus features raw data from Luminar’s high performance lidar sensors, which accurately detect objects ahead of the car out to 250 meters away. The dataset is intended to help advance research and refinement of self-driving software algorithms, in the interest of improved vehicle safety at highway speeds and in complex environments. Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering has also been contributing effort to the project.

To date, lidar research has relied on shorter range, lower resolution point clouds and uniform scanning patterns in public datasets. Luminar also has the unique capability of dynamically adjusting its scan pattern for optimized resolution up to 5x standard uniform distribution. This is reflected in the dataset, which also includes uniform lidar data and corresponding camera images, and annotations for reference.

The Cirrus dataset is being released as part of the new Volvo Cars Innovation Portal, which makes a broad variety of resources and tools available for free, allowing external developers to create new innovative services and in-car apps.

Earlier this year, Luminar signed the industry’s first production deal for autonomous consumer vehicles with Volvo Cars, while also recently striking deals with Daimler Truck AG and Intel’s Mobileye. Luminar has also received minority investments from the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer, Daimler Truck AG, and Volvo Cars, a global leader in automotive safety, to accelerate the introduction of autonomous trucks and cars at highway speed.