Towards Synthetic AI Training Data for Image Classification in Intralogistic Settings

Obtaining annotated data for proper training of AI image classifiers remains a challenge for successful deployment in industrial settings. As a promising alternative to handcrafted annotations, synthetic training data generation has grown in popularity. However, in most cases the pipelines used to generate this data are not of universal nature and have to be redesigned for different domain applications. This requires a detailed formulation of the domain through a semantic scene grammar. We aim to present such a grammar that is based on domain knowledge for the production-supplying transport of components in intralogistic settings. We present a use-case analysis for the domain of production supplying logistics and derive a scene grammar, which can be used to formulate similar problem statements in the domain for the purpose of data generation. We demonstrate the use of this grammar to feed a scene generation pipeline and obtain training data for an AI based image classifier.

Impact on Inference Model Performance for ML Tasks Using Real-Life Training Data and Synthetic Training Data from GANs

Collecting and labeling of good balanced training data are usually very difficult and challenging under real conditions. In addition to classic modeling methods, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offer a powerful possibility to generate synthetic training data. In this paper, we evaluate the hybrid usage of real-life and generated synthetic training data in different fractions and the effect on model performance. We found that a usage of up to 75% synthetic training data can compensate for both time-consuming and costly manual annotation while the model performance in our Deep Learning (DL) use case stays in the same range compared to a 100% share in hand-annotated real images. Using synthetic training data specifically tailored to induce a balanced dataset, special care can be taken concerning events that happen only on rare occasions and a prompt industrial application of ML models can be executed without too much delay, making these feasible and economically attractive for a wide scope of industrial applications in process and manufacturing industries. Hence, the main outcome of this paper is that our methodology can help to leverage the implementation of many different industrial Machine Learning and Computer Vision applications by making them economically maintainable. It can be concluded that a multitude of industrial ML use cases that require large and balanced training data containing all information that is relevant for the target model can be solved in the future following the findings that are presented in this study.

Accurate Segmentation of Bacterial Cells using Synthetic Training Data

We present a novel method of bacterial image segmentation using machine learning based on Synthetic Micro-graphs of Bacteria (SyMBac). SyMBac allows for rapid, automatic creation of arbitrary amounts of training datathat combines detailed models of cell growth, physical interactions, and microscope optics to create synthetic images which closely resemble real micrographs, with access to the ground truth positions of cells. We also demonstrate that models trained on SyMBac data generate more accurate and precise cell masks than those trained on human annotated data, because the model learns the true position of the cell irrespective of imaging artefacts