3D Environment Generation from Sparse Inputs for Automated Driving Function Development

The development of AI-driven automated driving functions requires vast amounts of diverse, high-quality data to ensure road safety and reliability. However, both the manual collection of real-world data and creation of 3D environments are costly, time-consuming, and hard to scale. Most automatic environment generation methods still rely heavily on manual effort, and only a few are tailored for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) training and validation. We propose an automated generative framework that learns ground-truth features to reconstruct 3D environments from a road definition and two simple parameters for country and area type. Environment generation is structured into three modules—map-based data generation, semantic city generation, and final detailing. The overall framework is validated by training a perception network on a mixed set of real and synthetic data, validating it solely on real data, and comparing performance to assess the practical value of the environments we generated. By constructing a Pareto front over combinations of training set sizes and real-to-synthetic data ratios, we show that our synthetic data can replace up to <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>85</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> of real data without significant quality degradation. Our results demonstrate how multi-layered environment generation frameworks enable flexible and scalable data generation for perception tasks while incorporating ground-truth 3D environment data. This reduces reliance on costly field data and supports automated rapid scenario exploration for finding safety-critical edge cases.