The saying "data is the new oil," was reportedly coined by British mathematician and marketing whiz Clive Humby in 2006. Data is the fuel powering modern AI models; without enough of it the performance of these systems will sputter and fail. And like oil, the resource is scarce and controlled by big businesses. What do you do if you're a small computer vision company? You can turn to fake data to train your models, and if you're lucky it might just work.

The survey's findings are based on responses from people working in the computer vision industry. However, the findings of the survey are of broader interest. First, because there is a broad spectrum of markets that are dependent upon computer vision, including extended reality, robotics, smart vehicles, and manufacturing. And second, because the approach of generating synthetic data for AI applications could be generalized beyond computer vision. Datagen, a company that specialized in simulated synthetic data, recently commissioned Wakefield Research to conduct an online survey of 300 computer vision professionals to better understand how they obtain and use AI/ML training data for computer vision systems and applications, and how those choices impact their projects.