Synthetic Data for Object Classification in Industrial Applications
This addresses data scarcity for industrial object classification, but it is incremental as it builds on existing synthetic data methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of limited training data for object classification in industrial applications by using synthetic images from a game engine combined with real images, achieving top accuracy with only 12 or 24 real images per class.
One of the biggest challenges in machine learning is data collection. Training data is an important part since it determines how the model will behave. In object classification, capturing a large number of images per object and in different conditions is not always possible and can be very time-consuming and tedious. Accordingly, this work explores the creation of artificial images using a game engine to cope with limited data in the training dataset. We combine real and synthetic data to train the object classification engine, a strategy that has shown to be beneficial to increase confidence in the decisions made by the classifier, which is often critical in industrial setups. To combine real and synthetic data, we first train the classifier on a massive amount of synthetic data, and then we fine-tune it on real images. Another important result is that the amount of real images needed for fine-tuning is not very high, reaching top accuracy with just 12 or 24 images per class. This substantially reduces the requirements of capturing a great amount of real data.