Improving the reliability of automotive perceptive sensors in degraded weather conditions, including fog, is an important issue for road safety and the development of automated driving. Cerema has designed the PAVIN platform reproducing fog and rain conditions to evaluate optical automotive sensor performance under these conditions. In order to increase the variety of scenarios and technologies under test, the use of digital simulation becomes a major asset. The purpose of this paper is to revive the debate around the realism of the various models underlying the numerical methods. The simulation of the radiative transfer equation by Monte Carlo methods and by simplified noise models is examined. The results of this paper show some gaps in foggy scenes between the ray-tracing method, which is considered to be the most realistic, and simple models for contrast evaluation, which can have a particularly strong impact on obstacle detection algorithms.

Accurate luminance-based image generation is critical in physically based simulations, as even minor inaccuracies in radiative transfer calculations can introduce noise or artifacts, adversely affecting image quality. The radiative transfer simulator, SWEET, uses a backward Monte Carlo approach, and its performance is analyzed alongside other simulators to assess how Monte Carlo-induced biases vary with parameters like optical thickness and medium anisotropy. This work details the advancements made to SWEET since the previous publication, with a specific focus on a more comprehensive comparison with other simulators such as Mitsuba. The core objective is to evaluate the precision of SWEET by comparing radiometric quantities like luminance, which serves as a method for validating the simulator. This analysis is particularly important in contexts such as automotive camera imaging, where accurate scene representation is crucial to reducing noise and ensuring the reliability of image-based systems in autonomous driving. By focusing on detailed radiometric comparisons, this study underscores SWEET’s ability to minimize noise, thus providing high-quality imaging for advanced applications.

Many coastal urban areas and many coastal facilities must be protected against pluvial and marine floods, as their location near the sea is necessary. As part of the development of a Probabilistic Flood Hazard Approach (PFHA), several flood phenomena have to be modelled at the same time (or with an offset time) to estimate the contribution of each one. Modelling the combination and the dependence of several flooding sources is a key issue in the context of a PFHA. As coastal zones in France are densely populated, marine flooding represents a natural hazard threatening the coastal populations and facilities in several areas along the shore. Indeed, marine flooding is the most important source of coastal lowlands inundations. It is mainly generated by storm action that makes sea level rise above the tide. Furthermore, when combined with rainfall, coastal flooding can be more consequent. While there are several approaches to analyse and characterize marine flooding hazard with either extreme sea levels or intense rainfall, only few studies combine these two phenomena in a PFHA framework. Thus this study aims to develop a method for the analysis of a combined action of rainfall and sea level. This analysis is performed on the city of Le Havre, a French urban city on the English Channel coast, as a case study. In this work, we have used deterministic materials for rainfall and sea level modelling and proposed a new approach for estimating the probabilities of flooding.

La modélisation des combinaisons de phénomènes d’inondation est une problématique d’actualité pour la communauté scientifique qui s’intéresse en priorité aux sites urbains et nucléaires. En effet, il est fort probable que l’approche déterministe explorant un certain nombre de scénarios possède certaines limites car ces scénarios déterministes assurent un conservatisme souvent excessif. Les approches probabilistes apportent une précision supplémentaire en s’appuyant sur les statistiques et les probabilités pour compléter les approches déterministes. Ces approches probabilistes visent à identifier et à combiner plusieurs scénarios d’aléa possibles pour couvrir plusieurs sources possibles du risque. L’approche probabiliste d’évaluation de l’aléa inondation (Probabilistic Flood Hazard Assessment ou PFHA) proposée dans cette thèse permet de caractériser une (des) quantité(s) d’intérêt (niveau d’eau, volume, durée d’immersion, etc.) à différents points d’un site en se basant sur les distributions des différents phénomènes de l’aléa inondation ainsi que les caractéristiques du site. Les principales étapes du PFHA sont : i) identification des phénomènes possibles (pluies, niveau marin, vagues, etc.), ii) identification et probabilisation des paramètres associés aux phénomènes d’inondation sélectionnés, iii) propagation de ces phénomènes depuis les sources jusqu’aux point d’intérêt sur le site, iv) construction de courbes d’aléa en agrégeant les contributions des phénomènes d’inondation. Les incertitudes sont un point important de la thèse dans la mesure où elles seront prises en compte dans toutes les étapes de l’approche probabiliste. Les travaux de cette thèse reposent sur l’étude de la conjonction de la pluie et du niveau marin et apportent une nouvelle méthode de prise en compte du déphasage temporel entre les phénomènes (coïncidence). Un modèle d’agrégation a été développé afin de combiner les contributions des différents phénomènes d’inondation. La question des incertitudes a été étudiée et une méthode reposant sur la théorie des fonctions de croyance a été utilisée car elle présente des avantages divers par rapport aux autres concepts (modélisation fidèle dans les cas d’ignorance totale et de manque d’informations, possibilité de combiner des informations d’origines et de natures différentes, etc.). La méthodologie proposée est appliquée au site du Havre, en France.

This article evaluates and compares deterministic and stochastic numerical methods for solving the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE), with application to the modeling of light propagation in participating media such as fogkey challenges for automotive sensor performance in adverse weather. The study focuses on two deterministic frameworks: the 1D Double-PN method (DPN) and the 3D Simplied PN (SPN) method under spherical symmetry with an isotropic point source. These are benchmarked against analytical solutions in isotropic and extreme scattering cases (purely forward/backward) to analyze convergence, numerical stability, and error behavior. In parallel, a probabilistic formulation of the RTE is introduced, and an explicit expression for the variance of the backward Monte Carlo method is derived, enabling rigorous assessment of stochastic simulations. Results show rst-order convergence in space for the DPN method and convergence diculties for the SPN method for distances close to the point source and for strong forward or backward scattering. Furthermore, numerical simulations validate the analytical expressions of the backward Monte Carlo variances obtained in the 1D case under isotropic scattering. These ndings provide essential tools for verifying Monte Carlo codes or other physically-based simulator, supporting virtual testing of autonomous driving systems under extreme weather conditions.