The benefits of synthetic data for action categorization

Abstract: In this paper, we study the value of using synthetically produced videos as training data for neural networks used for action categorization. Motivated by the fact that texture and background of a video play little to no significant roles in optical flow, we generated simplified texture-less and background-less videos and utilized the synthetic data to train a Temporal Segment Network (TSN). The results demonstrated that augmenting TSN with simplified synthetic data improved the original network accuracy (68.5%), achieving 71.8% on HMDB-51 when adding 4,000 videos and 72.4% when adding 8,000 videos. Also, training using simplified synthetic videos alone on 25 classes of UCF-101 achieved 30.71% when trained on 2500 videos and 52.7% when trained on 5000 videos. Finally, results showed that when reducing the number of real videos of UCF-25 to 10% and combining them with synthetic videos, the accuracy drops to only 85.41%, compared to a drop to 77.4% when no synthetic data is added.