Abstract
Machine learning has proven to be an enormous asset in industrial settings time and time again. While these methods are responsible for some of the most impressive technical advancements in recent years, machine learning and in particular deep learning, still heavily rely on big datasets, containing all the necessary information to learn a particular task. However, the procurement of useful data often imposes costly adjustments in production in case of internal collection, or has copyright implications in case of external collection. In some cases, the collection fails due to insufficient data quality, or simply availability. Moreover, privacy can be an ethical as well as a legal concern. A promising approach that deals with all of these challenges is to artificially generate data. Unlike real-world data, purely synthetic data does not prompt privacy considerations, allows for better quality control, and in many cases the number of synthetic datapoints is theoretically unlimited. In this work, we explore the utility of synthetic data in industrial settings by outlining several use-cases in the field of Automatic Number Plate Recognition. In all cases synthetic data has the potential of improving the results of the respective deep learning algorithms, substantially reducing the time and effort of data acquisition and preprocessing, and eliminating privacy concerns in a field as sensitive as Automatic Number Plate Recognition.
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Brunner, D., Schmid, F. (2022). Synthetic Data in Automatic Number Plate Recognition. In: Kotsis, G., et al. Database and Expert Systems Applications - DEXA 2022 Workshops. DEXA 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1633. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14343-4_11
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