UAV-Sim: NeRF-Based Synthetic Data Generation for UAV-Based Perception

Tremendous variations coupled with large degrees of freedom in UAV-based imaging conditions lead to a significant lack of data in adequately learning UAV-based perception models. Using various synthetic renderers in conjunction with perception models is prevalent to create synthetic data to augment the learning in the ground-based imaging domain. However, severe challenges in the austere UAV-based domain require distinctive solutions to image synthesis for data aug- mentation. In this work, we leverage recent advancements in neural rendering to improve static and dynamic novel- view UAV-based image synthesis, especially from high altitudes, capturing salient scene attributes. Finally, we demonstrate a considerable performance boost is achieved when a state-of- the-art detection model is optimized primarily on hybrid sets of real and synthetic data instead of the real or synthetic data separately.