Synthetic Data for Training and Evaluation of Critical Traffic Scenarios

• Main Author: Collin, Sofie
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Medie- och Informationsteknik 2021
• Subjects: Machine Learning; Autonomous Driving; Synthetic Data; Critical Traffic Scenarios; Pedestrian Detection; Image Processing; Robotics; Robotteknik och automation
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-177779

Modern camera-based vehicle safety systems heavily rely on machine learning and consequently require large amounts of training data to perform reliably. However, collecting and annotating the needed data is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process. In addition, it is exceptionally difficult to collect data that covers critical scenarios. This thesis investigates to what extent synthetic data can replace real-world data for these scenarios. Since only a limited amount of data consisting of such real-world scenarios is available, this thesis instead makes use of proxy scenarios, e.g. situations when pedestrians are located closely in front of the vehicle (for example at a crosswalk). The presented approach involves training a detector on real-world data where all samples of these proxy scenarios have been removed and compare it to other detectors trained on data where the removed samples have been replaced with various degrees of synthetic data. A method for generating and automatically and accurately annotating synthetic data, using features in the CARLA simulator, is presented. Also, the domain gap between the synthetic and real-world data is analyzed and methods in domain adaptation and data augmentation are reviewed. The presented experiments show that aligning statistical properties between the synthetic and real-world datasets distinctly mitigates the domain gap. There are also clear indications that synthetic data can help detect pedestrians in critical traffic situations === <p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>