CitySim: A Drone-Based Vehicle Trajectory Dataset for Safety-Oriented Research and Digital Twins

The development of safety-oriented research and applications requires fine-grain vehicle trajectories that not only have high accuracy, but also capture substantial safety-critical events. However, it would be challenging to satisfy both these requirements using the available vehicle trajectory datasets do not have the capacity to satisfy both. This paper introduces the CitySim dataset that has the core objective of facilitating safety-oriented research and applications. CitySim has vehicle trajectories extracted from 1,140-min of drone videos recorded at 12 locations. It covers a variety of road geometries including freeway basic segments, weaving segments, expressway merge/diverge segments, signalized intersections, stop-controlled intersections, and control-free intersections. CitySim was generated through a five-step procedure that ensured trajectory accuracy. The five-step procedure included video stabilization, object filtering, multivideo stitching, object detection and tracking, and enhanced error filtering. Furthermore, CitySim provides the rotated bounding box information of a vehicle, which was demonstrated to improve safety evaluations. Compared with other video-based trajectory datasets, CitySim had significantly more safety-critical events, including cut-in, merge, and diverge events, which were validated by distributions of both minimum time-to-collision and minimum post encroachment time. In addition, CitySim had the capability to facilitate digital-twin-related research by providing relevant assets, such as the recording locations’ three-dimensional base maps and signal timings.