Synthetic to Real Adaptation with Generative Correlation Alignment Networks

Synthetic images rendered from 3D CAD models are useful for augmenting training data for object recognition algorithms. However, the generated images are non-photorealistic and do not match real image statistics. This leads to a large domain discrepancy, causing models trained on synthetic data to perform poorly on real domains. Recent work has shown the great potential of deep convolutional neural networks to generate realistic images, but has not utilized generative models to address synthetic-to-real domain adaptation. In this work, we propose a Deep Generative Correlation Alignment Network (DGCAN) to synthesize images using a novel domain adaption algorithm. DGCAN leverages a shape preserving loss and a low level statistic matching loss to minimize the domain discrepancy between synthetic and real images in deep feature space. Experimentally, we show training off-the-shelf classifiers on the newly generated data can significantly boost performance when testing on the real image domains (PASCAL VOC 2007 benchmark and Office dataset), improving upon several existing methods.