Catalogue Photography as a Cold Start: Toward Deployable Carbide Burr Recognition

arXiv:2609.03995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verifying that manufactured batches of milling tools or carbide rotary burrs conform to production order sheets remains a largely manual and error-prone quality assurance task. Automating this process with computer vision faces a critical cold-start constraint since no labelled imagery is available, leaving manufacturer catalogue photography as the sole source of supervision. We investigate how far catalogue supervision can support an industrial recognition pipeline under domain shift, explicitly measuring the gap between catalogue separability and performance on held-out field photographs. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, off-the-shelf frozen feature extractors do not reliably separate the two task attributes, head shape and tooth profile, motivating targeted representation learning. Second, metric learning produces near-perfect unsupervised cluster discovery on catalogue images (adjusted Rand index 0.94--0.97), but less than half of this gain transfers to field photographs. Third, the largest transfer gains do not come from model scale or representation complexity, but from simple changes that reduce domain sensitivity: converting images to grayscale (+0.22) and constraining retrieval using the known order sheet via Hungarian assignment (+0.11). We therefore treat catalogue photography as a useful cold start rather than a deployment-ready training domain, and provide empirical baselines and an evaluation protocol for catalogue-to-field transfer in precision tool manufacturing.

Related

• RayDer: Scalable Self-Supervised Novel View Synthesis from Real-World Video
• Before the Shutter: Aesthetic and Actionable Portrait Photography Planning in 3D Scenes
• Using the YOLOv12 Model for Verifying the Correct Color Sequence of Wires in Network Cables (Patch Cords) on the Production Line

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-04