Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Efficient Sim-to-Real Data Augmentation in Micro-Object Pose Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tan, Zongcai, Wei, Lan, Zhang, Dandan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912721134419968
author Tan, Zongcai
Wei, Lan
Zhang, Dandan
author_facet Tan, Zongcai
Wei, Lan
Zhang, Dandan
contents Precise pose estimation of optical microrobots is essential for enabling high-precision object tracking and autonomous biological studies. However, current methods rely heavily on large, high-quality microscope image datasets, which are difficult and costly to acquire due to the complexity of microrobot fabrication and the labour-intensive labelling. Digital twin systems offer a promising path for sim-to-real data augmentation, yet existing techniques struggle to replicate complex optical microscopy phenomena, such as diffraction artifacts and depth-dependent imaging.This work proposes a novel physics-informed deep generative learning framework that, for the first time, integrates wave optics-based physical rendering and depth alignment into a generative adversarial network (GAN), to synthesise high-fidelity microscope images for microrobot pose estimation efficiently. Our method improves the structural similarity index (SSIM) by 35.6% compared to purely AI-driven methods, while maintaining real-time rendering speeds (0.022 s/frame).The pose estimator (CNN backbone) trained on our synthetic data achieves 93.9%/91.9% (pitch/roll) accuracy, just 5.0%/5.4% (pitch/roll) below that of an estimator trained exclusively on real data. Furthermore, our framework generalises to unseen poses, enabling data augmentation and robust pose estimation for novel microrobot configurations without additional training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_16494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Efficient Sim-to-Real Data Augmentation in Micro-Object Pose Estimation
Tan, Zongcai
Wei, Lan
Zhang, Dandan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Precise pose estimation of optical microrobots is essential for enabling high-precision object tracking and autonomous biological studies. However, current methods rely heavily on large, high-quality microscope image datasets, which are difficult and costly to acquire due to the complexity of microrobot fabrication and the labour-intensive labelling. Digital twin systems offer a promising path for sim-to-real data augmentation, yet existing techniques struggle to replicate complex optical microscopy phenomena, such as diffraction artifacts and depth-dependent imaging.This work proposes a novel physics-informed deep generative learning framework that, for the first time, integrates wave optics-based physical rendering and depth alignment into a generative adversarial network (GAN), to synthesise high-fidelity microscope images for microrobot pose estimation efficiently. Our method improves the structural similarity index (SSIM) by 35.6% compared to purely AI-driven methods, while maintaining real-time rendering speeds (0.022 s/frame).The pose estimator (CNN backbone) trained on our synthetic data achieves 93.9%/91.9% (pitch/roll) accuracy, just 5.0%/5.4% (pitch/roll) below that of an estimator trained exclusively on real data. Furthermore, our framework generalises to unseen poses, enabling data augmentation and robust pose estimation for novel microrobot configurations without additional training data.
title Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Efficient Sim-to-Real Data Augmentation in Micro-Object Pose Estimation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16494