Deep Learning and photo-realistic Simulation for real-world Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Driving, Adrien Gaidon (TRI)

Photo-realistic simulation is rapidly gaining momentum for visual training and test data generation in autonomous driving and general robotic contexts. This is particularly the case for video analysis, where manual labeling of data is extremely difficult or even impossible. This scarcity of adequate labeled training data is widely accepted as a major bottleneck of deep learning algorithms for important video understanding tasks like segmentation, tracking, and action recognition. In this talk, I will describe our use of modern game engines to generate large scale, densely labeled, high-quality synthetic video data with little to no manual intervention. In contrast to approaches using existing video games to record limited data from human game sessions, we build upon the more powerful approach of “virtual world generation”. Pioneering this approach, the recent Virtual KITTI [1] and SYNTHIA [2] datasets are among the largest fully-labelled datasets designed to boost perceptual tasks in the context of autonomous driving and video understanding (including semantic and instance segmentation, 2D and 3D object detection and tracking, optical flow estimation, depth estimation, and structure from motion). With our recent PHAV dataset [3], we push the limits of this approach further by providing stochastic simulations of human actions, camera paths, and environmental conditions. I will describe our work on these synthetic 4D environments to automatically generate potentially infinite amounts of varied and realistic data. I will also describe how to measure and mitigate the domain gap when learning deep neural networks for different perceptual tasks needed for self-driving. I will finally show some recent results on more interactive simulation for autonomous driving and adversarial learning to automatically improve the output of simulators.