Efficient Edge-Compatible CNN for Speckle-Based Material Recognition in Laser Cutting Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, efficient CNN for speckle-based material recognition in laser cutting, achieving high accuracy and speed on edge devices, enabling safer and more effective laser processing.

Contribution

A novel, compact CNN tailored for speckle patterns that outperforms larger models in accuracy and speed, suitable for deployment on low-power edge devices.

Findings

Achieves 95.05% accuracy on 59 material classes

Contains only 341k parameters, over 70 times fewer than ResNet-50

Runs at 295 images per second on edge hardware

Abstract

Accurate material recognition is critical for safe and effective laser cutting, as misidentification can lead to poor cut quality, machine damage, or the release of hazardous fumes. Laser speckle sensing has recently emerged as a low-cost and non-destructive modality for material classification; however, prior work has either relied on computationally expensive backbone networks or addressed only limited subsets of materials. In this study, A lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) tailored for speckle patterns is proposed, designed to minimize parameters while maintaining high discriminative power. Using the complete SensiCut dataset of 59 material classes spanning woods, acrylics, composites, textiles, metals, and paper-based products, the proposed model achieves 95.05% test accuracy, with macro and weighted F1-scores of 0.951. The network contains only 341k trainable parameters (~1.3 MB) -- over 70X fewer than ResNet-50 -- and achieves an inference speed of 295 images per second, enabling deployment on Raspberry Pi and Jetson-class devices. Furthermore, when materials are regrouped into nine and five practical families, recall exceeds 98% and approaches 100%, directly supporting power and speed preset selection in laser cutters. These results demonstrate that compact, domain-specific CNNs can outperform large backbones for speckle-based material classification, advancing the feasibility of material-aware, edge-deployable laser cutting systems.