1 research outputs found
Rain rendering for evaluating and improving robustness to bad weather
Rain fills the atmosphere with water particles, which breaks the common
assumption that light travels unaltered from the scene to the camera. While it
is well-known that rain affects computer vision algorithms, quantifying its
impact is difficult. In this context, we present a rain rendering pipeline that
enables the systematic evaluation of common computer vision algorithms to
controlled amounts of rain. We present three different ways to add synthetic
rain to existing images datasets: completely physic-based; completely
data-driven; and a combination of both. The physic-based rain augmentation
combines a physical particle simulator and accurate rain photometric modeling.
We validate our rendering methods with a user study, demonstrating our rain is
judged as much as 73% more realistic than the state-of-theart. Using our
generated rain-augmented KITTI, Cityscapes, and nuScenes datasets, we conduct a
thorough evaluation of object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth
estimation algorithms and show that their performance decreases in degraded
weather, on the order of 15% for object detection, 60% for semantic
segmentation, and 6-fold increase in depth estimation error. Finetuning on our
augmented synthetic data results in improvements of 21% on object detection,
37% on semantic segmentation, and 8% on depth estimation.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures, IJCV 2020 preprint. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1908.1033