Generating Synthetic Images & Data to Improve Object Detection in CCTV Footage from Public Transport

Passenger behaviour on public transport has become a source of great interest in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Operators are interested in employing new methods to monitor vehicle utilisation and passenger behaviour. One way to do this is through the use of Machine Learning, using the CCTV footage that is already being captured from the vehicles. However, one of the limitations of Machine Learning is that it requires large amounts of annotated training data, which is not always available. In this poster, we present a technique that uses 3D models to generate synthetic training images/data and discuss the effect that training with the synthetic data had on the Machine Learning models when applied to real-world CCTV footage.