DriveIndia: An Object Detection Dataset for Diverse Indian Traffic Scenes

Abstract: We introduce \textbf{DriveIndia}, a large-scale object detection dataset purpose-built to capture the complexity and unpredictability of Indian traffic environments. The dataset contains \textbf{66,986 high-resolution images} annotated in YOLO format across \textbf{24 traffic-relevant object categories}, encompassing diverse conditions such as varied weather (fog, rain), illumination changes, heterogeneous road infrastructure, and dense, mixed traffic patterns and collected over \textbf{120+ hours} and covering \textbf{3,400+ kilometers} across urban, rural, and highway routes. DriveIndia offers a comprehensive benchmark for real-world autonomous driving challenges. We provide baseline results using state-of-the-art \textbf{YOLO family models}, with the top-performing variant achieving a $mAP_{50}$ of \textbf{78.7\%}. Designed to support research in robust, generalizable object detection under uncertain road conditions, DriveIndia will be publicly available via the TiHAN-IIT Hyderabad dataset repository (https://tihan.iith.ac.in/tiand-datasets/).