Infusing Synthetic Data with Real-World Patterns for Zero-Shot Material State Segmentation

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Visual recognition of materials and their states is essential for understanding the physical world, from identifying wet regions on surfaces or stains on fabrics to detecting infected areas or minerals in rocks. Collecting data that captures this vast variability is complex due to the scattered and gradual nature of material states. Manually annotating real-world images is constrained by cost and precision, while synthetic data, although accurate and inexpensive, lacks real-world diversity. This work aims to bridge this gap by infusing patterns automatically extracted from real-world images into synthetic data. Hence, patterns collected from natural images are used to generate and map materials into synthetic scenes.