SynthRender and I-AsSET: Open-Source Framework and Dataset for Bidirectional Sim-Real Transfer in Industrial Object Perception

Object perception is fundamental for tasks such as robotic material handling and quality inspection. However, modern supervised deep-learning models require large annotated datasets for robust automation under semi-uncontrolled conditions; a major barrier for widespread deployment with proprietary industrial parts. We address this through an integrated framework combining synthetic data generation and structured empirical evaluation for systematic investigation of bidirectional sim-to-real transfer. Our method integrates 2D-to-3D Reality-to-Simulation techniques for 3D asset creation from physical parts with programmatic Guided Domain Randomization (GDR) via SynthRender, an open-source synthetic image generation framework. Structured ablation studies across multiple benchmarks quantify the impact of individual rendering design choices, yielding practical guidelines for data-efficient synthetic training. To support evaluation under realistic industrial conditions, we introduce Industrial Assets for Sim-to-Real Evaluation and Transfer (I-AsSET), a 32-class dataset with diverse textures, intra-class variation, strong inter-class similarities, and 19,672 annotations, providing both CAD models and reconstructed meshes for bidirectional sim-to-real benchmarking. Across three industrial benchmarks, the proposed framework achieves highly competitive performance, reaching 98.7% mAP@50 on a public robotics dataset, 97.9% mAP@50 on an automotive benchmark, and 95.1% mAP@50 on I-AsSET.