arXiv subjects

Paul Julius Kühn

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Julius Kühn.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Curating Synthetic Data for Task-Specific Visual Perception

Synthetic data are most valuable where general-purpose datasets cannot provide the domain-specific priors a task requires, and where manual annotation is expensive, imprecise, or infeasible. In this article we argue that the central question for specialized vision systems is not how to generate more data, but which data to generate. We therefore discuss curated synthetic data, whose scene content, appearance variations, sensing characteristics, and annotations are deliberately designed around a given task. We examine three complementary curation paradigms. Procedural rendering offers explicit control over scene parameters and the annotations follow by construction. Physically-based simulation encodes the mechanism behind an observed effect and yields exactly aligned supervision pairs. Generative AI learns sensor-specific appearance from small real seed sets and attains plausible realism, though it remains prone to hallucination and to inaccurate annotation. These paradigms are illustrated with examples from industrial surface defect detection, restoration of degraded digitized autochrome plates, and 6DoF pose estimation from RGB and event data. Using these examples, we analyze different data regimes and training strategies that combine synthetic and real data across these paradigms. We conclude that curated synthetic data are best understood as a complement to real observations, and that hybrid pipelines combining controllable supervision with learned appearance are the most promising direction for reliable sim-to-real transfer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AgenticCADedit: A Stateful, Tool-Mediated Agentic Approach to Multimodal 3D CAD Editing

Computer-aided design is central to industrial manufacturing, and much of a designer's daily work consists of editing existing models from multimodal requests involving speech, sketches, and model interaction. Existing neural CAD approaches focus predominantly on unconditional or text-conditioned generation. The neuralCAD-Edit approach formalizes expert multimodal editing requests, but its iterative baseline refines a complete CAD program across attempts, executing each attempt from the original model in a stateless CAD environment. Every attempt must therefore reconstruct the entire edit from scratch, so partially correct progress is discarded rather than accumulated, and the model can neither inspect the geometry it has just produced nor selectively revert a single faulty operation. We present AgenticCADedit, which turns editing into a sequence of small, verifiable actions on a persistent CAD state instead of a single regenerated program. Rather than emitting one complete program, it applies incremental code steps that each commit to the session, inspects the resulting faces and edges, renders highlighted selections to verify that the intended region was addressed, and reverts individual operations when it was not. Subsequent actions therefore build on the geometry produced by earlier ones. Our approach improves on all metrics for all three evaluated LLMs (open-weight: qwen3.6-27b, gemma4-31b; proprietary: gpt-5.6-luna), with the largest gains for the weakest baseline model, qwen3.6-27b, whose validity rises from 51.0% to 94.8% and acceptance from 1.6% to 12.0%. A token-cost analysis with gpt-5.6-luna further shows $66.7$% fewer output tokens than neuralCAD-Edit, while $94.8$% of input tokens are served from the prompt cache.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ScratchSim: A Procedural Synthetic Data Pipeline for Surface Scratch Detection

While automated defect detection such as the detection of surface scratched is an important aspect in industrial quality control, the scarcity of annotated defect data make this task challenging. This paper presents a procedural rendering pipeline that generates large-scale annotated synthetic training data using BlenderProc, with configurable material appearance, camera modes, and domain randomization, producing automatic COCO-format annotations. To show the potential of our approach, we evaluate four training strategies, namely synthetic-only, real-only, mixed, and fine-tuning from synthetic weights, across two objects with different material properties and three lightweight edge-deployable detectors, YOLOX, YOLO26, and LW-DETR. Our evaluation show that fine-tuning from synthetic weights consistently outperforms real-only training, and that mixed training effectively recovers performance under scarce real-data conditions, with findings validated across both convolutional and transformer-based architectures. The proposed approach enables scalable defect detection without the burden of large real annotated datasets, making it practical for on-device industrial inspection. The pipeline scripts for generating synthetic scratches, 3D model, and both the synthetic and real annotated scratch datasets for a glossy toy Ferrari car are publicly available at https://github.com/saptarshineil/ScratchSim.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TinyDETR-Pose: Towards End-to-End Real-Time Single-Stage 6DoF Object Pose Estimation with Lightweight Transformers

Real-time 6DoF object pose estimation on resource-constrained hardware remains challenging, as accurate correspondence-based and refinement pipelines typically rely on non-differentiable PnP/RANSAC stages or costly iterative refinement, while recent foundation-model-based approaches incur inference costs that are prohibitive for edge deployment. We present TinyDETR-Pose, a lightweight, end-to-end, single-stage framework that jointly detects objects and regresses their full 6D pose in a single forward pass. Built on the efficient LW-DETR architecture, TinyDETR-Pose formulates detection and pose estimation as a set-prediction problem and attaches dedicated MLP heads for rotation, monocular depth, and projected object center regression to each decoder query, eliminating the need for PnP, NMS (non-maximum suppression), or iterative pose refinement. Object symmetries are handled through a ADD-S loss applied uniformly to all objects, without the need for object-specific loss schedules or separate geodesic/ADD supervision. In addition, predictions are assigned to ground truth using a symmetry-safe Hungarian matcher based on class and 2D spatial cues, yielding stable assignment under symmetry and depth ambiguity. On YCB-V, TinyDETR-Pose achieves a comparable ADD-S AUC of 85.9, while requiring up to 72.7% fewer parameters than other DETR-based single-stage pose-estimation approaches. Due to its compact design, TinyDETR-Pose runs in real time and achieves an inference latency of only ~4.5 ms per frame on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano using TensorRT, demonstrating that accurate end-to-end transformer-based 6D pose estimation can be made practical for edge deployment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows

Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries. The code is available at https://github.com/saptarshineil/ai_assisted_atlas_segmentation

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SynSur: An end-to-end generative pipeline for synthetic industrial surface defect generation and detection

Industrial surface defect inspection suffers from a fundamental data bottleneck: defects are rare, annotations require expert knowledge, and collecting balanced training sets is slow and costly. We present SynSur, an end-to-end pipeline for synthetic defect generation and automatic annotation, designed to reduce the manual effort and data scarcity that limit deployed inspection systems. The pipeline combines Vision-Language-Model-based prompt construction, LoRA-adapted diffusion, mask-guided inpainting, metric-based sample filtering, and automatic label derivation. We evaluate SynSur on BSData (pitting defects on ball screw drives) and the scratch subset of MSD, reporting downstream detection performance across YOLOX, YOLOv26, and LW-DETR under real-only, synthetic-only, mixed, and union training regimes. The full generation pipeline processes a candidate pool of 1,000 images and delivers a filtered, annotated synthetic dataset with no manual labeling effort. Synthetic-only training does not replace real data; however, augmenting the full real set with synthetic samples yields consistent AP gains in selected configurations, and augmenting scarce real sets substantially reduces the performance gap to full real-data training. The cross-domain study on MSD confirms pipeline portability while highlighting the importance of domain-specific adaptation and annotation quality control. SynSur demonstrates that diffusion-based defect synthesis is a practically viable tool for strengthening industrial inspection pipelines, particularly where labeled data collection is the primary bottleneck.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Optimizing Multi-Modal Models for Image-Based Shape Retrieval: The Role of Pre-Alignment and Hard Contrastive Learning

Image-based shape retrieval (IBSR) aims to retrieve 3D models from a database given a query image, hence addressing a classical task in computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics. Recent approaches typically rely on bridging the domain gap between 2D images and 3D shapes based on the use of multi-view renderings as well as task-specific metric learning to embed shapes and images into a common latent space. In contrast, we address IBSR through large-scale multi-modal pretraining and show that explicit view-based supervision is not required. Inspired by pre-aligned image--point-cloud encoders from ULIP and OpenShape that have been used for tasks such as 3D shape classification, we propose the use of pre-aligned image and shape encoders for zero-shot and standard IBSR by embedding images and point clouds into a shared representation space and performing retrieval via similarity search over compact single-embedding shape descriptors. This formulation allows skipping view synthesis and naturally enables zero-shot and cross-domain retrieval without retraining on the target database. We evaluate pre-aligned encoders in both zero-shot and supervised IBSR settings and additionally introduce a multi-modal hard contrastive loss (HCL) to further increase retrieval performance. Our evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming related methods on $Acc_{Top1}$ and $Acc_{Top10}$ for shape retrieval across multiple datasets, with best results observed for OpenShape combined with Point-BERT. Furthermore, training on our proposed multi-modal HCL yields dataset-dependent gains in standard instance retrieval tasks on shape-centric data, underscoring the value of pretraining and hard contrastive learning for 3D shape retrieval. The code will be made available via the project website.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RangeSAM: On the Potential of Visual Foundation Models for Range-View represented LiDAR segmentation

Point cloud segmentation is central to autonomous driving and 3D scene understanding. While voxel- and point-based methods dominate recent research due to their compatibility with deep architectures and ability to capture fine-grained geometry, they often incur high computational cost, irregular memory access, and limited real-time efficiency. In contrast, range-view methods, though relatively underexplored - can leverage mature 2D semantic segmentation techniques for fast and accurate predictions. Motivated by the rapid progress in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) for captioning, zero-shot recognition, and multimodal tasks, we investigate whether SAM2, the current state-of-the-art VFM for segmentation tasks, can serve as a strong backbone for LiDAR point cloud segmentation in the range view. We present , to our knowledge, the first range-view framework that adapts SAM2 to 3D segmentation, coupling efficient 2D feature extraction with standard projection/back-projection to operate on point clouds. To optimize SAM2 for range-view representations, we implement several architectural modifications to the encoder: (1) a novel module that emphasizes horizontal spatial dependencies inherent in LiDAR range images, (2) a customized configuration of tailored to the geometric properties of spherical projections, and (3) an adapted mechanism in the encoder backbone specifically designed to capture the unique spatial patterns and discontinuities present in range-view pseudo-images. Our approach achieves competitive performance on SemanticKITTI while benefiting from the speed, scalability, and deployment simplicity of 2D-centric pipelines. This work highlights the viability of VFMs as general-purpose backbones for 3D perception and opens a path toward unified, foundation-model-driven LiDAR segmentation. Results lets us conclude that range-view segmentation methods using VFMs leads to promising results.

cs.CV↗