GeoSim: Realistic Video Simulation via Geometry-Aware Composition for Self-Driving
This work addresses the problem of realistic video simulation for self-driving, offering a method that improves over existing approaches by incorporating 3D geometry and dynamic objects, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the challenge of scalable sensor simulation for self-driving by introducing GeoSim, a geometry-aware image composition process that synthesizes realistic urban driving videos, achieving high-quality results for video simulation and data augmentation tasks.
Scalable sensor simulation is an important yet challenging open problem for safety-critical domains such as self-driving. Current works in image simulation either fail to be photorealistic or do not model the 3D environment and the dynamic objects within, losing high-level control and physical realism. In this paper, we present GeoSim, a geometry-aware image composition process which synthesizes novel urban driving scenarios by augmenting existing images with dynamic objects extracted from other scenes and rendered at novel poses. Towards this goal, we first build a diverse bank of 3D objects with both realistic geometry and appearance from sensor data. During simulation, we perform a novel geometry-aware simulation-by-composition procedure which 1) proposes plausible and realistic object placements into a given scene, 2) render novel views of dynamic objects from the asset bank, and 3) composes and blends the rendered image segments. The resulting synthetic images are realistic, traffic-aware, and geometrically consistent, allowing our approach to scale to complex use cases. We demonstrate two such important applications: long-range realistic video simulation across multiple camera sensors, and synthetic data generation for data augmentation on downstream segmentation tasks. Please check https://tmux.top/publication/geosim/ for high-resolution video results.