Last time, I started a new series of posts, devoted to different ways of improving model performance with synthetic data. In the first post of the series, we discussed probably the simplest and most widely used way to generate synthetic data: geometric and color data augmentation applied to real training data. Today, we take the idea of data augmentation much further. We will discuss several different ways to construct “smart augmentations” that make much more involved transformations of the input but still change the labeling only in predictable ways.
Welcome back, everybody! It’s been a while since I finished the last series on object detection with synthetic data (here is the series in case you missed it: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). So it is high time to start a new series. Over the next several posts, we will discuss how synthetic data and similar techniques can drive model performance and improve the results. We will mostly be talking about computer vision tasks. We begin this series with an explanation of data augmentation in computer vision; today we will talk about simple “classical” augmentations, and next time we will turn to some of the more interesting stuff.
We have been talking about the history of synthetic data for quite some time, but it’s time to get back to 2020! I’m preparing a new series, but in the meantime, today we discuss a paper called “Learning From Context-Agnostic Synthetic Data” by MIT researchers Charles Jin and Martin Rinard, recently released on arXiv (it’s less than a month old). They present a new way to train on synthetic data based on few-shot learning, claiming to need very few synthetic examples; in essence, their paper extends the cut-n-paste approach to generating synthetic datasets. Let’s find out more and, pardon the pun, give their results some context.
Optical 3D range sensors, like RGB-D cameras and LIDAR, have found widespread use in robotics to generate rich and accurate 3D maps of the environment, from self-driving cars to autonomous manipulators. However, despite the ubiquity of these complex robotic systems, transparent objects (like a glass container) can confound even a suite of expensive sensors that are commonly used.
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