Training and testing object detectors with virtual images

In the area of computer vision, deep learning has produced a variety of state-of-the-art models that rely on massive labeled data. However, collecting and annotating images from the real world is too demanding in terms of labor and money investments, and is usually inflexible to build datasets with specific characteristics, such as small area of objects and high occlusion level. Under the framework of Parallel Vision, this paper presents a purposeful way to design artificial scenes and automatically generate virtual images with precise annotations. A virtual dataset named ParallelEye is built, which can be used for several computer vision tasks. Then, by training the DPM U+0028 Deformable parts model U+0029 and Faster R-CNN detectors, we prove that the performance of models can be significantly improved by combining ParallelEye with publicly available real-world datasets during the training phase. In addition, we investigate the potential of testing the trained models from a specific aspect using intentionally designed virtual datasets, in order to discover the flaws of trained models. From the experimental results, we conclude that our virtual dataset is viable to train and test the object detectors.