In plain words: A system generates photorealistic city scenes in a game engine and automatically records where objects sit, replacing real photos and hand-labeling. A detector trained on them found objects in real aerial photos better than one trained on a driving simulator, scoring 7.8 points higher.
Abstract · Boundless: Generating Photorealistic Synthetic Data for Object Detection in Urban Streetscapes
We introduce Boundless, a photo-realistic synthetic data generation system for enabling highly accurate object detection in dense urban streetscapes. Boundless can replace massive real-world data collection and manual ground-truth object annotation (labeling) with an automated and configurable process. Boundless is based on the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) City Sample project with improvements enabling accurate collection of 3D bounding boxes across different lighting and scene variability conditions. We evaluate the performance of object detection models trained on the dataset generated by Boundless when used for inference on a real-world dataset acquired from medium-altitude cameras. We compare the performance of the Boundless-trained model against the CARLA-trained model and observe an improvement of 7.8 mAP. The results we achieved support the premise that synthetic data generation is a credible methodology for training/fine-tuning scalable object detection models for urban scenes.
Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Yuyang Li, Chengbo Zang, Javad Ghaderi, Gil Zussman, Zoran Kostic
arXiv:2409.03022 · cs.CV · submitted Sep 4, 2024 · updated Sep 26, 2024
abstract · pdf · html