Image-Bot: Generating Synthetic Object Detection Datasets for Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturing Companies

Training datasets for image recognition are poorly available for small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, due to the specialized products they work with, and the disproportionate investment to generate their own ones. Thus, we investigate a new approach: The Image-Bot consists of a physical apparatus and a processing pipeline to generate training datasets from real-world objects easily. It takes pictures of the objects in front of a green screen and blends them with random backgrounds. The approach was tested with 23 objects and a YOLOv5 algorithm. It creates a state-of-the-art training dataset with about 2,000 images per object in under 45 min.