A Real-Calibrated Synthetic-First Data Engine

Abstract:Modern computer vision systems increasingly encounter performance limitations in data-scarce domains, where collecting large-scale, high-quality labeled data is costly or impractical. While controllable diffusion models enable scalable synthetic image generation, directly applying synthetic augmentation often leads to unstable performance gains due to dataset-level quality issues and insufficient feedback mechanisms. In this work, we present a Real-Calibrated Synthetic-First Data Engine, a modular data engineering framework that combines controllable diffusion generation and multi-stage curation/filtering within a unified pipeline, with optional support for uncertainty-driven selection and human verification. Instead of introducing new generative algorithms, our approach focuses on systematic dataset construction for improving the practical reliability of synthetic augmentation in low-data regimes. The framework is implemented as a modular CLI-based pipeline, where generation, filtering, selection, and validation components can be independently configured and replaced. This design emphasizes reproducibility, flexibility, and practical deployment in real-world data workflows. Through empirical evaluation centered on human pose estimation, we show that synthetic data improves a real-data baseline when used as near-zero-human-annotation-cost augmentation alongside real anchors, while synthetic-only training remains substantially below real-only performance. Supplementary segmentation diagnostics show the same domain-gap pattern. These results highlight the practical value of data-centric orchestration for low-data augmentation.

Image and Video Processing (eess.IV); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2605.09699 [eess.IV]

(or arXiv:2605.09699v2 [eess.IV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.09699 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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