We propose a perception imitation method to simulate results of a certain
perception model, and discuss a new heuristic route of autonomous driving
simulator without data synthesis. The motivation is that original sensor data
is not always necessary for tasks such as planning and control when semantic
perception results are ready, so that simulating perception directly is more
economic and efficient. In this work, a series of evaluation methods such as
matching metric and performance of downstream task are exploited to examine the
simulation quality. Experiments show that our method is effective to model the
behavior of learning-based perception model, and can be further applied in the
proposed simulation route smoothly