With recent progress in graphics, it has become more tractable to train models on synthetic images, potentially avoiding the need for expensive annotations. However, learning from synthetic images may not achieve the desired performance due to a gap between synthetic and real image distributions. To reduce this gap, we propose Simulated+Unsupervised (S+U) learning, where the task is to learn a model to improve the realism of a simulator's output using unlabeled real data, while preserving the annotation information from the simulator. We develop a method for S+U learning that uses an adversarial network similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), but with synthetic images as inputs instead of random vectors. We make several key modifications to the standard GAN algorithm to preserve annotations, avoid artifacts, and stabilize training: (i) a 'self-regularization' term, (ii) a local adversarial loss, and (iii) updating the discriminator using a history of refined images. We show that this enables generation of highly realistic images, which we demonstrate both qualitatively and with a user study. We quantitatively evaluate the generated images by training models for gaze estimation and hand pose estimation. We show a significant improvement over using synthetic images, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the MPIIGaze dataset without any labeled real data.
Ganin and Lempitsky @cite_15 use synthetic data in a domain adaptation setting where the learned features are invariant to the domain shift between synthetic and real images. Wang al @cite_46 train a Stacked Convolutional Auto-Encoder on synthetic and real data to learn the lower-level representations of their font detector ConvNet. Zhang al @cite_40 learn a Multichannel Autoencoder to reduce the domain shift between real and synthetic data. In contrast to classical domain adaptation methods that adapt the features with respect to a specific prediction task, we bridge the gap between image distributions through adversarial training. This approach allows us to generate realistic training images which can be used to train any machine learning model, potentially for multiple tasks.
@cite_46 @cite_40 @cite_15
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Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images often fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that attempt to map representations between the two domains or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we present a new approach that learns, in an unsupervised manner, a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that have tried to either map representations between the two domains, or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we approach the problem in a new light by learning in an unsupervised manner a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results. The recent advances in deep neural networks have convincingly demonstrated high capability in learning vision models on large datasets. Nevertheless, collecting expert labeled datasets especially with pixel-level annotations is an extremely expensive process. An appealing alternative is to render synthetic data (e.g., computer games) and generate ground truth automatically. However, simply applying the models learnt on synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to domain shift. In this paper, we facilitate this issue from the perspectives of both visual appearance-level and representation-level domain adaptation. The former adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the "style" in the target domain and the latter attempts to learn domain-invariant representations. Specifically, we present Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks (FCAN), a novel deep architecture for semantic segmentation which combines Appearance Adaptation Networks (AAN) and Representation Adaptation Networks (RAN). AAN learns a transformation from one domain to the other in the pixel space and RAN is optimized in an adversarial learning manner to maximally fool the domain discriminator with the learnt source and target representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on the transfer from GTA5 (game videos) to Cityscapes (urban street scenes) on semantic segmentation and our proposal achieves superior results when comparing to state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation techniques. More remarkably, we obtain a new record: mIoU of 47.5 on BDDS (drive-cam videos) in an unsupervised setting.