From Benchmark to Deployment: Shift-Robust Fabric Recognition for Industrial Textile Onboarding
Automatically recognising a fabric's construction (jersey, twill, satin) is a bottleneck in textile sourcing, where incoming swatches are still typed by hand. Benchmark accuracy suggests the problem is solved, yet rarely survives deployment. On the \numClasses{}-class FabricFlow benchmark we expose three gaps that headline accuracy hides. First, a duplication audit reveals train/test leakage that inflates accuracy; we rebuild leakage-free splits that report the true difficulty. Second, on the clean data the binding failure is acquisition-source shift between catalogues, not the peripheral shortcuts one might fear: on an archive-exclusive hold-out, standard training holds 58.0\% Top-1 at a calibration error of 0.158, while a simple, architecture-agnostic central-texture recipe adds 13.5 Top-1 points and restores calibration. Third, because confusing one fabric family for another is costlier than a within-family slip, we optimise a taxonomic-severity cost: a confidence-gated routing policy auto-types confident swatches and refers only the uncertain minority to a human, sharply cutting onboarding cost. Throughout we report honest negatives: hierarchical classification, OCR fusion and zero-shot vision--language models all fail to help, yielding a concrete, calibrated, cost-aware recipe for deployable textile onboarding.