Reliable classification of 3D-printed objects is essential for automating post-production workflows in industrial additive manufacturing. Despite extensive automation in other stages of the printing pipeline, this task still relies heavily on manual inspection, as the set of objects to be classified can change daily, making frequent model retraining impractical. Automating the identification step is therefore critical for improving operational efficiency. A vision model that could classify any set of objects by utilizing their corresponding CAD models and avoiding retraining would be highly beneficial in this setting. To enable systematic evaluation of vision models on this task, we introduce ThingiPrint, a new publicly available dataset that pairs CAD models with real photographs of their 3D-printed counterparts. Using ThingiPrint, we benchmark a range of existing vision models on the task of 3D-printed object classification. We additionally show that contrastive fine-tuning with a rotation-invariant objective allows effective prototype-based classification of previously unseen 3D-printed objects. By relying solely on the available CAD models, this avoids the need for retraining when new objects are introduced. Experiments show that this approach outperforms standard pretrained baselines, suggesting improved generalization and practical relevance for real-world use.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: ThingiPrint Dataset. Examples of paired CAD models and real images of their 3D-printed counterparts. Our dataset includes 100 CAD models sourced from the Thingi10K dataset, each accompanied by multiple real-world photographs of the corresponding 3D-printed objects.
Figure 2: Examples of objects in ThingiPrint. Our dataset consists of various 3D-printed objects with diverse geometries.
Figure 3: Example of the data collection process using smart glasses. The user positions the object within the rectangular region displayed on the device, and this region is cropped to obtain the final image.
Figure 4: Object capture. Example photos of a single object from our dataset. The object is hand-held and rotated to capture a variety of orientations.
Figure 5: Overview of the classification pipeline at inference. (Left): At test time, we render images for each CAD model and compute a prototype vector pi to represent each object by averaging the representations of the encoded images. (Right): During inference, we classify an image of a 3D-printed object by comparing its feature representation zt to the computed prototype vectors and picking the object ID o with the highest similarity.
Figure 6: Rotation-invariant training. Different views of the same object are encouraged to have similar representations, while views of other objects serve as negative examples in the contrastive training framework.
Model
Top-1 (%)
Top-5 (%)
Pretrained Models
CLIP
27.1
61.0
ResNet50
35.9
67.7
DINOv2
61.8
86.4
Fine-tuned Models
ResNet50
59.7 +23.8
84.7 +17
Table 1: Comparison of pretrained and fine-tuned models on ThingiPrint. Subscript deltas indicate absolute improvements over the corresponding pretrained model.
Figure 7: Per-object accuracy change. Fine-tuning leads to improved accuracy for most objects, though a few objects experience a decline in performance.
Model
Top-1 (%)
Top-5 (%)
Pretrained Models
CLIP
16.2
54.2
ResNet50
30.3
74.8
DINOv2
49.4
92.2
Fine-tuned Models
ResNet50
44.2 +13.9
88.5 +13.7
Table 2: Classification accuracy on ThingiPrint for visually similar objects across models. Improvements in parentheses indicate gains over the corresponding pretrained model.
Figure 8: Visually similar objects. The dataset includes some objects with similar geometric shapes or symmetric counterparts, which pose challenges for the classification task.
Figure 9: Printer-specific appearance. Example of the same object printed with different 3D printers. Left: printed with Prusa MK4. Right: printed with an industrial printer.
Printer type
Model
Synthetic Fine-Tuning
Industrial
Prusa MK4
∣Δ∣
ResNet50
✗
36.2
39.0
2.8
ResNet50
✓
58.8
53.0
5.8
DINOv2
✗
69.5
72.9
3.4
DINOv2
✓
80.9
79.0
1.9
Table 3: Top-1 classification accuracy of different models on the same 20-object subset printed with different 3D printers. The ∣Δ∣ column represents the absolute difference of the accuracies between the two printers.
Model
Synthetic Fine-Tuning
Rotation invariance
Top-1 (%)
ResNet50
✗
✗
35.9
ResNet50
✓
✗
56.2 +20.3
ResNet50
✓
✓
59.7 +23.8
DINOv2
✗
✗
61.8
DINOv2
✓
✗
68.9 +7.1
DINOv2
✓
✓
76.5 +14.7
Table 4: Impact of rotation-invariance training on classification performance on ThingiPrint. Improvements are relative to the corresponding non-fine-tuned model.
Figure 10: Number of renderings at inference. Effect of the number of rendered images on classification accuracy under different rendering strategies. We compare rendering images from a fixed elevation angle (30° or 60°) to rendering from both elevations while varying the azimuth angle. Increasing the number of renderings improves accuracy, with diminishing returns in all cases; combined elevation sampling consistently achieves the highest performance.
Figure 11: Viewpoint selection strategy. Comparison of random vs. uniform sampling strategies for rendering images around the object. The uniform sampling yields higher classification accuracy across different numbers of renderings, highlighting the advantage of better viewpoint coverage in prototype construction.
Figure 12: Impact of aggregating predictions from multiple images at inference time on classification accuracy. Accuracy consistently improves with the number of views, demonstrating the benefit of multi-view prediction aggregation.
Autonomous vision applications in production, intralogistics, or manufacturing environments require perception capabilities beyond a small, fixed set of classes. Recent open-vocabulary methods, leveraging 2D Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFMs), target this task but often rely on class-agnostic segmentation models pre-trained on non-industrial datasets (e.g., household scenes). In this work, we first demonstrate that such models fail to generalize, performing poorly on common industrial objects. Therefore, we propose a training-free, open-vocabulary 3D perception pipeline that overcomes this limitation. Instead of using a pre-trained model to generate instance proposals, our method simply generates masks by merging pre-computed superpoints based on their semantic features. Following, we evaluate the domain-adapted VLFM "IndustrialCLIP" on a representative 3D industrial workshop scene for open-vocabulary querying. Our qualitative results demonstrate successful segmentation of industrial objects.
Keno Moenck, Adrian Philip Florea, Julian Koch +1
Hamburg University of Technology, Institute of Aircraft Production Technology
Incremental 3D object perception is a critical step toward embodied intelligence in dynamic indoor environments. However, existing incremental 3D detection methods rely on extensive annotations of novel classes for satisfactory performance. To address this limitation, we propose FI3Det, a Few-shot Incremental 3D Detection framework that enables efficient 3D perception with only a few novel samples by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) to learn knowledge of unseen categories. FI3Det introduces a VLM-guided unknown object learning module in the base stage to enhance perception of unseen categories. Specifically, it employs VLMs to mine unknown objects and extract comprehensive representations, including 2D semantic features and class-agnostic 3D bounding boxes. To mitigate noise in these representations, a weighting mechanism is further designed to re-weight the contributions of point- and box-level features based on their spatial locations and feature consistency within each box. Moreover, FI3Det proposes a gated multimodal prototype imprinting module, where category prototypes are constructed from aligned 2D semantic and 3D geometric features to compute classification scores, which are then fused via a multimodal gating mechanism for novel object detection. As the first framework for few-shot incremental 3D object detection, we establish both batch and sequential evaluation settings on two datasets, ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D, where FI3Det achieves strong and consistent improvements over baseline methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/FI3Det.
Yun Zhu, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang +2
Nanjing University of Science and Technology · Nanjing University · Singapore University of Technology and Design
Verbal-prompted segmentation is inherently limited by the expressiveness of natural language and struggles with uncommon, instance-specific, or difficult-to-describe objects: scenarios frequently encountered in manufacturing and 3D printing environments. While image exemplars provide an alternative, they primarily encode appearance cues such as color and texture, which are often unrelated to a part's geometric identity. In industrial settings, a single component may be produced in different materials, finishes, or colors, making appearance-based prompting unreliable. In contrast, such objects are typically defined by precise CAD models that capture their canonical geometry. We propose a CAD-prompted segmentation framework built on SAM3 that uses canonical multi-view renderings of a CAD model as prompt input. The rendered views provide geometry-based conditioning independent of surface appearance. The model is trained using synthetic data generated from mesh renderings in simulation under diverse viewpoints and scene contexts. Our approach enables single-stage, CAD-prompted mask prediction, extending promptable segmentation to objects that cannot be robustly described by language or appearance alone.
Zhenran Tang, Rohan Nagabhirava, Changliu Liu
the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA