Generating synthetic golf courses with deep learning : Investigation into the uses and limitations of generative deep learning

Abstract: The power of generative deep learning has increased very quickly in the past ten years and modern models are now able to generate human faces that are indistinguishable from real ones. This thesis project will investigate the uses and limitations of this technology by attempting to generate very specific data, images of golf holes. Generative adverserial networks, GANs, were used to solve this problem. Two different GAN models were chosen as candidates and these were trained on some different datasets that were extracted from the project provider Topgolf Sweden AB’s virtual golf game. This golf game contained data of many different types of golf holes from all over the world. The best performing model was Progressive Growing GAN, ProGAN, which works by iteratively increasing the size of the images until the desired size is reached. This model was able to produce results of very high quality and with large variety. To further investigate the quality of the results a survey was sent out to the employees of Topgolf Sweden AB. A survey that showed that it was difficult for the participants to correctly determine if a given image was real or had been generated by the model. These results further showed that the generated samples had a high quality. This thesis project also investigated how height data could be incorporated in the process. The results showed that the ProGAN model was able to generate height maps that capture the most important aspects of a golf hole. Furthermore, the overall results showed that the generative model had learned a good representation of the data’s underlying probability distribution. More work needs to be done before a model like the one presented here can be used to generate complete golf holes that can be used in a virtual golf game, but this project clearly shows that GANs are a worthwhile investment for this purpose.