Industrial Synthetic Segment Pre-training

TL;DR

This paper introduces InsCore, a synthetic, fully annotated dataset for industrial instance segmentation that eliminates the need for real images or manual annotations, outperforming existing models including fine-tuned SAM on industrial datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents InsCore, a novel synthetic dataset generated via formula-driven supervised learning, enabling effective pre-training for industrial segmentation without real images or human annotations.

Findings

InsCore pre-trained models outperform COCO, ImageNet-21k, and fine-tuned SAM.

Achieves 6.2 points higher in segmentation performance on average.

Uses only 100k synthetic images, demonstrating high data efficiency.

Abstract

Pre-training on real-image datasets has been widely proven effective for improving instance segmentation. However, industrial applications face two key challenges: (1) legal and ethical restrictions, such as ImageNet's prohibition of commercial use, and (2) limited transferability due to the domain gap between web images and industrial imagery. Even recent vision foundation models, including the segment anything model (SAM), show notable performance degradation in industrial settings. These challenges raise critical questions: Can we build a vision foundation model for industrial applications without relying on real images or manual annotations? And can such models outperform even fine-tuned SAM on industrial datasets? To address these questions, we propose the Instance Core Segmentation Dataset (InsCore), a synthetic pre-training dataset based on formula-driven supervised learning (FDSL). InsCore generates fully annotated instance segmentation images that reflect key characteristics of industrial data, including complex occlusions, dense hierarchical masks, and diverse non-rigid shapes, distinct from typical web imagery. Unlike previous methods, InsCore requires neither real images nor human annotations. Experiments on five industrial datasets show that models pre-trained with InsCore outperform those trained on COCO and ImageNet-21k, as well as fine-tuned SAM, achieving an average improvement of 6.2 points in instance segmentation performance. This result is achieved using only 100k synthetic images, more than 100 times fewer than the 11 million images in SAM's SA-1B dataset, demonstrating the data efficiency of our approach. These findings position InsCore as a practical and license-free vision foundation model for industrial applications.