  While convolutional neural networks are dominating the field of computer
vision, one usually does not have access to the large amount of domain-relevant
data needed for their training. It thus became common to use available
synthetic samples along domain adaptation schemes to prepare algorithms for the
target domain. Tackling this problem from a different angle, we introduce a
pipeline to map unseen target samples into the synthetic domain used to train
task-specific methods. Denoising the data and retaining only the features these
recognition algorithms are familiar with, our solution greatly improves their
performance. As this mapping is easier to learn than the opposite one (ie to
learn to generate realistic features to augment the source samples), we
demonstrate how our whole solution can be trained purely on augmented synthetic
data, and still perform better than methods trained with domain-relevant
information (eg real images or realistic textures for the 3D models). Applying
our approach to object recognition from texture-less CAD data, we present a
custom generative network which fully utilizes the purely geometrical
information to learn robust features and achieve a more refined mapping for
unseen color images.
