Real-World Perception for Autonomous Driving in Adverse Weather: Enhancing Standard Detectors via Foundation-Guided Auto-Annotation

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Standard deployment-ready object detectors for autonomous vehicles degrade in adverse weather and lighting conditions without being trained on extensive domain-specific data. While large-scale vision foundation models offer robust zero-shot generalization, their high computational cost makes them impractical for real-time deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose a foundation-guided auto-annotation pipeline that enhances standard detectors without architectural changes. We first benchmark three distinct models, YOLOv8, Co-DETR, and SAM3, on our custom real-world driving dataset spanning 25 unique operational scenarios across various route, weather, and lighting conditions. Based on our analysis, SAM3 demonstrates superior accuracy and resilience across all scenarios. Thus, we deploy it as an offline auto-annotator to generate pseudo-labels on the unannotated subset of our dataset. Fine-tuning the baseline YOLOv8 on these annotations yields a 16.04% higher overall mean Average Precision (mAP) and improves cross-environmental stability compared to the baseline model, highlighted by a 32.73% and 28.65% mAP increase in Residential Direct Sunlight and Highway Fog, respectively. These results demonstrate that standard detectors can achieve environmental resilience without the need for extensive manual annotation or architectural modifications.