Oswald Lanz

Synthetic dataset generation in Computer Vision, particularly for industrial applications, is still underexplored. Industrial defect segmentation, for instance, requires highly accurate labels, yet acquiring such data is costly and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we propose a novel diffusion-based pipeline for generating high-fidelity industrial datasets with minimal supervision. Our approach conditions the diffusion model on enriched bounding-box representations to produce precise segmentation masks, ensuring realistic and accurately localized defect synthesis. Compared to existing layout-conditioned generative methods, our approach improves defect consistency and spatial accuracy. We introduce two quantitative metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of our method and assess its impact on a downstream segmentation task trained on real and synthetic data. Our results demonstrate that diffusion-based synthesis can bridge the gap between artificial and real-world industrial data, fostering more reliable and cost-efficient segmentation models.

Food waste is a serious problem in modern society. A specific aspect of food waste concerns meat consumption in gastronomy, where typically only prime cuts of meat are used in the kitchen. To facilitate the usage of all parts of animals and thereby reducing food waste, we present Onfoods , a system that recommends alternative meat cuts in recipes and integrates inventory data to help with the creation of menus. Onfoods uses an ontology and a knowledge graph to model recipes, meat cuts and the relationships between the two, similarity measures to find candidates for alternative meat cuts, and inventory data to track the availability of different meat cuts. An intuitive user interface allows the user on one hand to update the knowledge graph and inventory data, and on the other hand to navigate through recipes and choose alternative meat cuts.

Anomaly detection is crucial in large-scale industrial manufacturing as it helps to detect and localize defective parts. Pre-training feature extractors on large-scale datasets is a popular approach for this task. Stringent data security, privacy regulations, high costs, and long acquisition time hinder the development of large-scale datasets for training and benchmarking. Despite recent work focusing primarily on the development of new anomaly detection methods based on such extractors, not much attention has been paid to the importance of the data used for pre-training. This study compares representative models pre-trained with fractal images against those pre-trained with ImageNet, without subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluated the performance of eleven state-of-the-art methods on MVTecAD, MVTec LOCO AD, and VisA, well-known benchmark datasets inspired by real-world industrial inspection scenarios. Further, we propose a novel method to create a dataset by combining the dynamically generated fractal images creating a “Multi-Formula” dataset. Even though pre-training with ImageNet leads to better results, fractals can achieve close performance to ImageNet under proper parametrization. This opens up the possibility for a new research direction where feature extractors could be trained on synthetically generated abstract datasets mitigating the ever-increasing demand for data in machine learning while circumventing privacy and security concerns.

Anomaly detection is crucial in large-scale industrial manufacturing as it helps detect and localise defective parts. Pre-training feature extractors on large-scale datasets is a popular approach for this task. Stringent data security, privacy regulations, high costs and acquisition time hinder the development of large-scale datasets for training and benchmarking. Despite recent work focusing primarily on the development of new anomaly detection methods based on such extractors, not much attention has been paid to the importance of the data used for pre-training. This study compares representative models pre-trained with fractal images against those pre-trained with ImageNet, without subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluated the performance of eleven state-of-the-art methods on MVTecAD, MVTec LOCO AD, and VisA, well-known benchmark datasets inspired by real-world industrial inspection scenarios. Further, we propose a novel method to create a dataset by combining the dynamically generated fractal images creating a ``Multi-Formula'' dataset. Even though pre-training with ImageNet leads to better results, fractals can achieve close performance to ImageNet under proper parametrisation. This opens up the possibility for a new research direction where feature extractors could be trained on synthetically generated abstract datasets mitigating the ever-increasing demand for data in machine learning while circumventing privacy and security concerns.

Anomaly detection is crucial in large-scale industrial manufacturing as it helps detect and localise defective parts. Pre-training feature extractors on large-scale datasets is a popular approach for this task. Stringent data security and privacy regulations and high costs and acquisition time hinder the availability and creation of such large datasets. While recent work in anomaly detection primarily focuses on the development of new methods built on such extractors, the importance of the data used for pre-training has not been studied. Therefore, we evaluated the performance of eight state-of-the-art methods pre-trained using dynamically generated fractal images on the famous benchmark datasets MVTec and VisA. In contrast to existing literature, which predominantly examines the transfer-learning capabilities of fractals, in this study, we compare models pre-trained with fractal images against those pre-trained with ImageNet, without subsequent fine-tuning. Although pre-training with ImageNet remains a clear winner, the results of fractals are promising considering that the anomaly detection task required features capable of discerning even minor visual variations. This opens up the possibility for a new research direction where feature extractors could be trained on synthetically generated abstract datasets reconciling the ever-increasing demand for data in machine learning while circumventing privacy and security concerns.

As a fundamental part of computational healthcare, Computer Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provide volumetric data, making the development of algorithms for 3D image analysis a necessity. Despite being computationally cheap, 2D Convolutional Neural Networks can only extract spatial information. In contrast, 3D CNNs can extract three-dimensional features, but they have higher computational costs and latency, which is a limitation for clinical practice that requires fast and efficient models. Inspired by the field of video action recognition we propose a new 2D-based model dubbed Slice SHift UNet (SSH-UNet) which encodes three-dimensional features at 2D CNN’s complexity. More precisely multi-view features are collaboratively learned by performing 2D convolutions along the three orthogonal planes of a volume and imposing a weights-sharing mechanism. The third dimension, which is neglected by the 2D convolution, is reincorporated by shifting a portion of the feature maps along the slices’ axis. The effectiveness of our approach is validated in Multi-Modality Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation (AMOS) and Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV) datasets, showing that SSH-UNet is more efficient while on par in performance with state-of-the-art architectures.

As a fundamental part of computational healthcare, Computer Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provide volumetric data, making the development of algorithms for 3D image analysis a necessity. Despite being computationally cheap, 2D Convolutional Neural Networks can only extract spatial information. In contrast, 3D CNNs can extract three-dimensional features, but they have higher computational costs and latency, which is a limitation for clinical practice that requires fast and efficient models. Inspired by the field of video action recognition we propose a new 2D-based model dubbed Slice SHift UNet (SSH-UNet) which encodes three-dimensional features at 2D CNN's complexity. More precisely multi-view features are collaboratively learned by performing 2D convolutions along the three orthogonal planes of a volume and imposing a weights-sharing mechanism. The third dimension, which is neglected by the 2D convolution, is reincorporated by shifting a portion of the feature maps along the slices' axis. The effectiveness of our approach is validated in Multi-Modality Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation (AMOS) and Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV) datasets, showing that SSH-UNet is more efficient while on par in performance with state-of-the-art architectures.