Partially fake it till you make it: mixing real and fake thermal images for improved object detection
This addresses a domain-specific problem for thermal imaging applications, where data scarcity is a bottleneck, and it is incremental by combining synthetic and real data.
The paper tackles the problem of limited training data for object detection in thermal videos by proposing a data augmentation approach that composites synthetic 3D objects into real scenes, achieving state-of-the-art results on the FLIR ADAS dataset.
In this paper we propose a novel data augmentation approach for visual content domains that have scarce training datasets, compositing synthetic 3D objects within real scenes. We show the performance of the proposed system in the context of object detection in thermal videos, a domain where 1) training datasets are very limited compared to visible spectrum datasets and 2) creating full realistic synthetic scenes is extremely cumbersome and expensive due to the difficulty in modeling the thermal properties of the materials of the scene. We compare different augmentation strategies, including state of the art approaches obtained through RL techniques, the injection of simulated data and the employment of a generative model, and study how to best combine our proposed augmentation with these other techniques.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and our single-modality detector achieves state-of-the-art results on the FLIR ADAS dataset.