Using Game Engine to Generate Synthetic Datasets for Machine Learning

Tomas Bubenicek

Supervisor(s): Jiri Bittner

Czech Technical University


Abstract: Datasets for use in computer vision machine learning are often challenging to acquire. Often, datasets are created either using hand-labeling or via expensive measurements. In this paper, we characterize different augmented image data used in computer vision machine learning tasks and propose a method of generating such data synthetically using a game engine. We implement a Unity plugin for creating such augmented image data outputs, usable in existing Unity projects. The implementation allows for RGB lit output and several ground-truth outputs, such as depth and normal information, object or category segmentation, motion segmentation, forward and backward optical flow and occlusions, 2D and 3D bounding boxes, and camera parameters. We also explore the possibilities of added realism by using an external path-tracing renderer instead of the rasterization pipeline, which is currently the standard in most game engines. We demonstrate our tool by creating configurable example scenes, which are specifically designed for training machine learning algorithms.
Keywords: Computer Vision, Rendering, Video Games
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Year: 2020