Papers › Object Detector Differences when using Synthetic and Real Training Data
Object Detector Differences when using Synthetic and Real Training Data
Martin Georg Ljungqvist, Otto Nordander, Markus Skans, Arvid Mildner, Tony Liu, Pierre Nugues
To train well-performing generalizing neural networks, sufficiently large and diverse datasets are needed. Collecting data while adhering to privacy legislation becomes increasingly difficult and annotating these large datasets is both a resource-heavy and time-consuming task. An approach to overcome these difficulties is to use synthetic data since it is inherently scalable and can be automatically annotated. However, how training on synthetic data affects the layers of a neural network is still unclear. In this paper, we train the YOLOv3 object detector on real and synthetic images from city environments. We perform a similarity analysis using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) to explore the effects of training on synthetic data on a layer-wise basis. The analysis captures the architecture of the detector while showing both different and similar patterns between different models. With this similarity analysis we want to give insights on how training synthetic data affects each layer and to give a better understanding of the inner workings of complex neural networks. The results show that the largest similarity between a detector trained on real data and a detector trained on synthetic data was in the early layers, and the largest difference was in the head part. The results also show that no major difference in performance or similarity could be seen between frozen and unfrozen backbone.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections