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5 papers in the last four weeks, down 37% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Apr 27, 2026cs.CV

Graph-augmented Segmentation of Complex Shapes in Laser Powder bed Fusion for Enhanced In Situ Inspection

The technological maturity of in situ inspection and monitoring methods in additive manufacturing is steadily increasing, enabling more efficient and practical qualification procedures. In this context, image segmentation of powder bed images in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) has been investigated by various authors, leveraging both edge detection and machine learning approaches to identify deviations from nominal geometry. Despite these developments, several challenges remain, including the sensitivity of segmentation performance to industrial illumination conditions and layer-to-layer variability in pixel intensity patterns. The study addresses these limitations by proposing a graph-augmented segmentation approach. The underlying principle consists of preserving the geometrical information at a global level rather than at pixel-wise level, modeling dependencies and relational information among spatial regions with a Graph Neural Network bottleneck embedded into a U-Net architecture. This allows enhancing the consistency and accuracy of the geometry reconstruction in the presence of spatial and layer-wise photometric variability systematically faced in real data. The method is evaluated against benchmark techniques for the in situ reconstruction of lattice structures produced by L-PBF, demonstrating its potential as a scalable solution for robust in situ inspection and geometric verification in industrial environments.

Stefano Raimondo, Matteo Bugatti, Marco Grasso

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Via La Masa 1, 20156 Milan, Italy

Graph Neural NetworksU-NetIndustrial InspectionConvolutional Neural NetworksAdditive Manufacturing
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Apr 26, 2026cs.CV

SolarFCD: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Solar Fault Classification in Photovoltaic Systems

The increasing global deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems needs robust, scalable, and automated inspection technologies capable of detecting a wide range of panel flaws under a variety of operating situations. The lack of large-scale, multi-modal, publicly available annotated datasets is a major obstacle preventing advancement in this field. We introduce SolarFCD, an extensive dataset of solar panel defects created by methodically combining and reconciling three publicly accessible datasets covering two imaging modalities: RGB/Drone images and Thermal Infrared. The dataset consist of 4,435 images arranged under four unified defect classes such as: healthy images, Surface Obstruction, structural fault, and electrical fault. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and test splits at an 80:10:10 ratio through methodical label mapping, near-duplicate removal, and targeted augmentation of minority classes. Sixteen classification architectures from five design families were trained and assessed on the dataset to provide repeatable benchmark baselines. With an accuracy of 86.68%, precision of 88.65%, recall of 88.62%, and F1-score of 88.17%, ResNet101V2 performed the best overall. Per-class results showed balanced detection across all four defect categories within a narrow performance band of less than 1.2 percentage points. To promote open and repeatable research in automated PV inspection and solar energy operations and maintenance, the dataset, annotation files, and baseline code are made openly available.

Misbah Ijaz, Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Abd Ur Rehman +4

Department of Computer Science, University of Gujrat, Gujrat, 51700,2026 Pakistan. · Department of Computer Science, Rhineland-Palatinate TechnicalApr University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, 67663, Germany. · 3German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, 67663, Germany.

Industrial InspectionAnomaly Detection
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Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

IoT-Enhanced CNN-Based Labelled Crack Detection for Additive Manufacturing Image Annotation in Industry 4.0

This paper presents an IoT-enhanced deep learning framework for automated crack detection in Additive Manufacturing (AM) surfaces using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). By integrating IoT-enabled real-time monitoring, high-resolution imaging, and edge computing, the system enables continuous in-situ defect detection and classification. Real-time data acquisition supports immediate CNN-based analysis, improving both accuracy and efficiency in AM quality control. The framework supports supervised and semi-supervised learning, enabling robust performance on large, sparsely annotated datasets. Using LabelImg for annotation and OpenCV for preprocessing, the system achieves 99.54% accuracy on 14,982 images, with 96% precision, 98% recall, and a 97% F1-score. Dataset balancing and augmentation significantly improve generalization, increasing accuracy from 32% to 99%. Beyond detection, the framework establishes a linkage between AM process parameters, defect formation, and surface topology, supporting predictive analytics and defect mitigation. Aligned with Industry 4.0, it incorporates Digital Twin (DT) technology for real-time process simulation, predictive maintenance, and adaptive control. Key contributions include an IoT-based monitoring system using edge devices (Raspberry Pi 4B), an optimized CNN with model quantization and batch processing reducing inference latency by 47%, and an MQTT-based low-latency data streaming system with 5G connectivity, lowering transmission overhead by 35%. DT integration further enables predictive defect analysis and dynamic adjustment of AM parameters. This work advances intelligent AM quality control by providing a scalable, high-accuracy, and low-latency framework. Future directions include multimodal data fusion, hybrid architectures, and enhanced Digital Twin simulations for AI-driven defect prevention.

Mohsen Asghari Ilani, Yaser Mike Banad

School of Management, Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, 73019, U.S.A.

Edge InferenceIndustrial InspectionAdditive ManufacturingAnomaly Detection
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Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

Accelerating New Product Introduction for Visual Quality Inspection via Few-Shot Diffusion-Based Defect Synthesis

Industrial visual inspection systems often suffer from a severe scarcity of labeled defect data, particularly during the early stages of New Product Introduction (NPI). This limitation hinders the deployment of robust supervised detectors precisely when automated quality control is most needed. We present an end-to-end generative framework for high-fidelity, few-shot defect synthesis that enables both in-domain augmentation and cross-domain transfer. Our approach disentangles defect morphology from background appearance by combining masked textual inversion for defect representation learning, noise-blended conditioned generation for surface-aware synthesis, and gradient-aware post-processing for seamless visual integration. We evaluate the framework in two practically relevant settings: few-shot data augmentation, where synthetic samples enrich a small set of real defects, and zero-shot adaptation, where defects learned from a source domain are transferred to a novel target surface without any real target-domain defect examples. Using RF-DETR as the downstream detector, we show that the proposed pipeline substantially narrows the domain gap on a private industrial dataset. In the few-shot setting, synthetic augmentation improves mAP from 78.8% to 83.3%. In the zero-shot setting, synthetic domain adaptation improves mAP from 65.0% to 85.1%. These results demonstrate that high-fidelity defect synthesis can meaningfully accelerate NPI by enabling effective inspection models before sufficient real defect data has been collected.

Serkan Hamdi Güğül, Kemal Levi, Burak Acar

Relimetrics, Inc.

Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationSynthetic Data AugmentationIndustrial InspectionDiffusion-Based Image GenerationSynthetic Anomaly Generation
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Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

Autonomous UAV Pipeline Near-proximity Inspection via Disturbance-Aware Predictive Visual Servoing

Reliable pipeline inspection is critical to safe energy transportation, but is constrained by long distances, complex terrain, and risks to human inspectors. Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a flexible sensing platform, yet reliable autonomous inspection remains challenging. This paper presents an autonomous quadrotor near-proximity pipeline inspection framework for three-dimensional scenarios based on image-based visual servoing model predictive control (VMPC). A unified predictive model couples quadrotor dynamics with image feature kinematics, enabling direct image-space prediction within the control loop. To address low-rate visual updates, measurement noise, and environmental uncertainties, an extended-state Kalman filtering scheme with image feature prediction (ESKF-PRE) is developed, and the estimated lumped disturbances are incorporated into the VMPC prediction model, yielding the ESKF-PRE-VMPC framework. A terrain-adaptive velocity design is introduced to maintain the desired cruising speed while generating vertical velocity references over unknown terrain slopes without prior terrain information. The framework is validated in high-fidelity Gazebo simulations and real-world experiments. In real-world tests, the proposed method reduces RMSE by 52.63% and 75.04% in pipeline orientation and lateral deviation in the image, respectively, for straight-pipeline inspection without wind, and successfully completes both wind-disturbance and bend-pipeline tasks where baseline method fails. An open-source nano quadrotor is modified for indoor experimentation.

Wen Li, Hui Wang, Jinya Su +3

School of Automation, Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of CSE, Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering, Loughborough University, LE11 3TU, United Kingdom · Research Centre for Low Altitude Economy and the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

UAV NavigationIndustrial InspectionModel Predictive ControlQuadrotor ControlVision-Based Robot Control
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Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Bridging Foundation Models and ASTM Metallurgical Standards for Automated Grain Size Estimation from Microscopy Images

Extracting standardized metallurgical metrics from microscopy images remains challenging due to complex grain morphology and the data demands of supervised segmentation. To bridge foundational computer vision with practical metallurgical evaluation, we propose an automated pipeline for dense instance segmentation and grain size estimation that adapts Cellpose-SAM to microstructures and integrates its topology-aware gradient tracking with an ASTM E112 Jeffries planimetric module. We systematically benchmark this pipeline against a classical convolutional network (U-Net), an adaptive-prompting vision foundation model (MatSAM) and a contemporary vision-language model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B). Our evaluations reveal that while the out-of-the-box vision-language model struggles with the localized spatial reasoning required for dense microscopic counting and MatSAM suffers from over-segmentation despite its domain-specific prompt generation, our adapted pipeline successfully maintains topological separation. Furthermore, experiments across progressively reduced training splits demonstrate exceptional few-shot scalability; utilizing only two training samples, the proposed system predicts the ASTM grain size number (G) with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as low as 1.50%, while robustness testing across varying target grain counts empirically validates the ASTM 50-grain sampling minimum. These results highlight the efficacy of application-level foundation model integration for highly accurate, automated materials characterization. Our project repository is available at https://github.com/mueez-overflow/ASTM-Grain-Size-Estimator.

Abdul Mueez, Shruti Vyas

University of Central Florida

Vision Foundation ModelsInstance SegmentationIndustrial InspectionMicroscopy Image Analysis
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Apr 19, 2026cs.CV

Lost in Motion: Vision Language Models Fail the Dynamic Gauges Test

The digital transformation of industrial manufacturing increasingly relies on the ability of autonomous robots to interact with legacy infrastructure, particularly analog gauges. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have the potential to provide a general solution for gauge reading and have already shown good performance in instrument recognition. However, performing accurate, real-time gauge readings is a more complex task. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art models, including versions from the GPT-5 (5.4 Thinking and 5.3 Instant) and Gemini 3 (Pro and Flash) families, against a set of simple but realistic dynamic gauge reading scenarios. To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce a novel dataset comprising video sequences of three instruments of different gauge types: circular, linear, and Vernier, under diverse motion and speed profiles. Our findings indicate that the evaluated frontier VLMs, under our specific testing conditions, exhibit a limited ability to interpret needle trajectories and scale semantics, failing to provide the traceability and reliability needed for safety-critical monitoring. The results demonstrate that these models have not yet achieved the performance necessary to be classified as trustworthy synthetic instruments under existing IEEE and ISO standards.

Tairan Fu, Francisco Javier Santos-Martín, Javier Conde +2

VLM EvaluationIndustrial InspectionTemporal Video Understanding
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Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

TowerDataset: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Transmission Corridor Segmentation with a Global-Local Fusion Framework

Fine-grained semantic segmentation of transmission-corridor point clouds is fundamental for intelligent power-line inspection. However, current progress is limited by realistic data scarcity and the difficulty of modeling global corridor structure and local geometric details in long, heterogeneous scenes. Existing public datasets usually provide only a few coarse categories or short cropped scenes which overlook long-range structural dependencies, severe long-tail distributions, and subtle distinctions among safety-critical components. As a result, current methods are difficult to evaluate under realistic inspection settings, and their ability to preserve and integrate complementary global and local cues remains unclear. To address the above challenges, we introduce TowerDataset, a heterogeneous benchmark for transmission-corridor segmentation. TowerDataset contains 661 real-world scenes and about 2.466 billion points. It preserves long corridor extents, defines a fine-grained 22-class taxonomy, and provides standardized splits and evaluation protocols. In addition, we present a global-local fusion framework which preserves and fuses whole-scene and local-detail information. A whole-scene branch with NoCrop training and prototypical contrastive learning captures long-range topology and contextual dependencies. A block-wise local branch retains fine geometric structures. Both predictions are then fused and refined by geometric validation. This design allows the model to exploit both global relationships and local shape details when recognizing rare and confusing components. Experiments on TowerDataset and two public benchmarks demonstrate the challenge of the proposed benchmark and the robustness of our framework in real, complex, and heterogeneous transmission-corridor scenes. The dataset will be released soon at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tccx18/Towerdataset/tree/main.

Xu Cui, Xinyan Liu, Chen Yang +4

Harbin Institute of Technology (Weihai) · University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences · City University of Hong Kong

3D Point Cloud SegmentationIndustrial Inspection3D Semantic Segmentation
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Apr 13, 2026cs.CV

Towards Automated Solar Panel Integrity: Hybrid Deep Feature Extraction for Advanced Surface Defect Identification

To ensure energy efficiency and reliable operations, it is essential to monitor solar panels in generation plants to detect defects. It is quite labor-intensive, time consuming and costly to manually monitor large-scale solar plants and those installed in remote areas. Manual inspection may also be susceptible to human errors. Consequently, it is necessary to create an automated, intelligent defect-detection system, that ensures continuous monitoring, early fault detection, and maximum power generation. We proposed a novel hybrid method for defect detection in SOLAR plates by combining both handcrafted and deep learning features. Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Histogram of Gradients (HoG) and Gabor Filters were used for the extraction of handcrafted features. Deep features extracted by leveraging the use of DenseNet-169. Both handcrafted and deep features were concatenated and then fed to three distinct types of classifiers, including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boost (XGBoost) and Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LGBM). Experimental results evaluated on the augmented dataset show the superior performance, especially DenseNet-169 + Gabor (SVM), had the highest scores with 99.17% accuracy which was higher than all the other systems. In general, the proposed hybrid framework offers better defect-detection accuracy, resistance, and flexibility that has a solid basis on the real-life use of the automated PV panels monitoring system.

Muhammad Junaid Asif, Muhammad Saad Rafaqat, Usman Nazakat +2

Artificial Intelligence Technology Centre (AITeC), National Centre for Physics (NCP), Islamabad 44000, Pakistan · School of Computing, Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (PAFIAST), Haripur 22620, Pakistan

Industrial InspectionFeature Fusion
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Mar 23, 2026cs.CV

Back to Point: Exploring Point-Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection

Zero-shot (ZS) 3D anomaly detection is crucial for reliable industrial inspection, as it enables detecting and localizing defects without requiring any target-category training data. Existing approaches render 3D point clouds into 2D images and leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for anomaly detection. However, such strategies inevitably discard geometric details and exhibit limited sensitivity to local anomalies. In this paper, we revisit intrinsic 3D representations and explore the potential of pre-trained Point-Language Models (PLMs) for ZS 3D anomaly detection. We propose BTP (Back To Point), a novel framework that effectively aligns 3D point cloud and textual embeddings. Specifically, BTP aligns multi-granularity patch features with textual representations for localized anomaly detection, while incorporating geometric descriptors to enhance sensitivity to structural anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce a joint representation learning strategy that leverages auxiliary point cloud data to improve robustness and enrich anomaly semantics. Extensive experiments on Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet demonstrate that BTP achieves superior performance in ZS 3D anomaly detection. Code will be available at https://github.com/wistful-8029/BTP-3DAD.

Kaiqiang Li, Gang Li, Mingle Zhou +3

Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, China. · Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computing Power Internet and Service Computing, Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science, Jinan, China.

Point Cloud Anomaly DetectionIndustrial Inspection3D Representation LearningZero-Shot Anomaly Detection
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Jan 29, 2026cs.RO

Multimodal Benchmark for Safety Assessment in Industrial Inspection Scenarios

With the rapid development of industrial intelligence and unmanned inspection, reliable perception and safety assessment for AI systems in complex and dynamic industrial sites has become a key bottleneck for deploying predictive maintenance and autonomous inspection. Most public datasets remain limited by simulated data sources, single-modality sensing, or the absence of fine-grained object-level annotations, which prevents robust scene understanding and multimodal safety reasoning for industrial foundation models. To address these limitations, InspecSafe-V1 is released as the first multimodal benchmark dataset for industrial inspection safety assessment that is collected from routine operations of real inspection robots in real-world environments. InspecSafe-V1 covers five representative industrial scenarios, including tunnels, power facilities, sintering equipment, oil and gas petrochemical plants, and coal conveyor trestles. The dataset is constructed from 41 wheeled and rail-mounted inspection robots operating at 2,239 valid inspection sites, yielding 5,013 inspection instances. For each instance, pixel-level segmentation annotations are provided for key objects in visible-spectrum images. In addition, a semantic scene description and a corresponding safety level label are provided according to practical inspection tasks. Seven synchronized sensing modalities are further included, including infrared video, audio, depth point clouds, radar point clouds, gas measurements, temperature, and humidity, to support multimodal anomaly recognition, cross-modal fusion, and comprehensive safety assessment in industrial environments.

Zeyi Liu, Shuang Liu, Jihai Min +7

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · TetraBOT Intelligence Co., Ltd., Nanjing 210000, China +2

Robotic InspectionIndustrial InspectionMultimodal Sensor Fusion
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Jan 14, 2026cs.CV

LPCAN: Lightweight Pyramid Cross-Attention Network for Rail Surface Defect Detection Using RGB-D Data

This paper addresses the limitations of current vision-based rail defect detection methods, including high computational complexity, excessive parameter counts, and suboptimal accuracy. We propose a Lightweight Pyramid Cross-Attention Network (LPCANet) that leverages RGB-D data for efficient and accurate defect identification. The architecture integrates MobileNetv2 as a backbone for RGB feature extraction with a lightweight pyramid module (LPM) for depth processing, coupled with a cross-attention mechanism (CAM) for multimodal fusion and a spatial feature extractor (SFE) for enhanced structural analysis. Comprehensive evaluations on three unsupervised RGB-D rail datasets (NEU-RSDDS-AUG, RSDD-TYPE1, RSDD-TYPE2) demonstrate that LPCANet achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 9.90 million parameters, 2.50 G FLOPs, and 162.60 fps inference speed. Compared to 18 existing methods, LPCANet shows significant improvements, including +1.48% in SαS_α, +0.86% in IOU, and +1.77% in MAE over the best-performing baseline. Ablation studies confirm the critical roles of CAM and SFE, while experiments on non-rail datasets (DAGM2007, MT, Kolektor-SDD2) validate its generalization capability. The proposed framework effectively bridges traditional and deep learning approaches, offering substantial practical value for industrial defect inspection. Future work will focus on further model compression for real-time deployment.

Jackie Alex, Guoqiang Huan

St. Petersburg College

Industrial Anomaly DetectionIndustrial Inspection
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Mar 6, 2025cs.CV

ISP-AD: A Large-Scale Real-World Dataset for Advancing Industrial Anomaly Detection with Synthetic and Real Defects

Automatic visual inspection using machine learning plays a key role in achieving zero-defect policies in industry. Research on anomaly detection is constrained by the availability of datasets that capture complex defect appearances and imperfect imaging conditions, which are typical of production processes. Recent benchmarks indicate that most publicly available datasets are biased towards optimal imaging conditions, leading to an overestimation of their applicability in real-world industrial scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce the Industrial Screen Printing Anomaly Detection Dataset (ISP-AD). It presents challenging small and weakly contrasted surface defects embedded within structured patterns exhibiting high permitted design variability. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest publicly available industrial dataset to date, including both synthetic and real defects collected directly from the factory floor. Beyond benchmarking recent unsupervised anomaly detection methods, experiments on a mixed supervised training strategy, incorporating both synthesized and real defects, were conducted. Experiments show that even a small amount of injected, weakly labeled real defects improves generalization. Furthermore, starting from training on purely synthetic defects, emerging real defective samples can be efficiently integrated into subsequent scalable training. Overall, our findings indicate that model-free synthetic defects can provide a cold-start baseline, whereas a small number of injected real defects refine the decision boundary for previously unseen defect characteristics. The presented unsupervised and supervised dataset splits are designed to emphasize research on unsupervised, self-supervised, and supervised approaches, enhancing their applicability to industrial settings.

Paul J. Krassnig, Dieter P. Gruber

Polymer Competence Center Leoben GmbH, Leoben, Austria. · Chair of Materials Science and Testing of Polymers, Montanuniversitat Leoben, Leoben, Austria.

Industrial Anomaly DetectionIndustrial InspectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection
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Date pendingcs.CV

Catalogue Photography as a Cold Start: Toward Deployable Rotary Milling Tool Recognition

Verifying that manufactured batches of rotary milling tools, also known as carbide 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 from the deployment environment 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), yet on field photographs under half of the accuracy gained from training survives. 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 against the known order sheet (+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.

Abilash Philip Madavath, Chandra Yuvesh Aubeeluck, Augustin Raju +3

TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany

ManufacturingDomain GeneralizationIndustrial InspectionImage Classification
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