mehmetkeremturkcan/boundless-simulator

Boundless Simulator

Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Yuyang Li, Chengbo Zang, Javad Ghaderi, Gil Zussman, Zoran Kostic
AIDL Lab, Columbia University

Website  |  arXiv  |  Python API  |  Dataset

The Boundless simulator for Windows. It renders photorealistic dense urban streetscapes from automatically placed infrastructure cameras and writes exact 2D and 3D bounding boxes for every vehicle and pedestrian in view. Lighting, weather, traffic, parked vehicles and pedestrians are controlled from Python through the Boundless Python API. Boundless is built on the Unreal Engine 5 City Sample and includes its Small City and Big City maps.

Requirements

OS	Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
GPU	NVIDIA RTX with hardware ray tracing and 12 GB+ VRAM; an RTX 4080 or better for 4K
Memory	32 GB RAM
Disk	22 GB for the simulator, on an SSD

Download

pip install -U huggingface_hub
hf download mehmetkeremturkcan/boundless-simulator --local-dir C:/Boundless

If the simulator does not start, install the Unreal Engine prerequisites with C:\Boundless\Engine\Extras\Redist\en-us\UEPrereqSetup_x64.exe. The first launch compiles shaders for your GPU and takes a few minutes longer than later launches.

Usage

Start the simulator in API mode on one of the two maps:

C:\Boundless\Boundless.exe -BoundlessMode=api -BoundlessMap=/Game/Map/Big_City_LVL -windowed -ResX=3840 -ResY=2160 -ForceRes

Then capture labeled frames with the Python API:

git clone https://github.com/mkturkcan/boundless.git
cd boundless
pip install -e .
python examples/quickstart.py

Flag	Meaning
-BoundlessMode=api	Start directly in API mode. Without it the simulator opens a menu for choosing the map, mode, resolution and scene.
-BoundlessMap=<path>	/Game/Map/Small_City_LVL or /Game/Map/Big_City_LVL
-BoundlessPort=<n>	API port, 2000 by default
-ResX, -ResY, -windowed, -ForceRes	Image size. Frames are captured at the window size; -ForceRes allows windows larger than the desktop.

The collect_dataset.py example launches the simulator by itself and generates a complete dataset unattended:

python examples/collect_dataset.py --out C:/data/boundless_bigcity_4k --target 10000 --launch C:/Boundless/Boundless.exe

License

The Boundless simulator is built with Unreal Engine and is subject to the Unreal Engine EULA. Unreal and Unreal Engine are trademarks or registered trademarks of Epic Games, Inc.

Citation

@article{turkcan2024boundless,
  title   = {Boundless: Generating Photorealistic Synthetic Data for Object Detection in Urban Streetscapes},
  author  = {Turkcan, Mehmet Kerem and Li, Yuyang and Zang, Chengbo and Ghaderi, Javad and Zussman, Gil and Kostic, Zoran},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.03022},
  year    = {2024}
}