Rendering Synthetic Defects for Learning‐Based Industrial Inspection

Abstract

Computer vision increasingly uses synthetic data from physically based rendering to supplement limited real‐world datasets. In industrial inspection, defect data is scarce and the rendering pipeline is explicitly controlled, and synthetic defect generation therefore becomes a dataset design problem. In this setting, building a dataset means choosing points in a rendering parameter space: defect shape, material, illumination, viewpoint, and sampling define the training distribution, but their effect on downstream learning is often hard to judge from images alone. We therefore study how these factors change defect features, where their relation to downstream learning is easier to inspect. Our results show that the rendering factors do not matter equally: defect shape, material, illumination, and viewpoint often affect downstream behavior much more than the number of samples per pixel. Synthetic subsets that transfer better downstream tend to stay close to real defect features, cover the observed defect modes, and stay separated from the defect‐free (OK) region. Based on these observations, we build a simple feature‐space screening heuristic for selecting subsets from large candidate pools. The selected subsets often outperform matched random selection for downstream segmentation on real data.