# Evaluating Synthetic Data for Baggage Trolley Detection in Airport Logistics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07645/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [BlenderProc](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01911/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient luggage trolley management is critical for reducing congestion and ensuring asset availability in modern airports. Automated detection systems face two main challenges. First, strict security and privacy regulations limit large-scale data collection. Second, existing public datasets lack the diversity, scale, and annotation quality needed to handle dense, overlapping trolley arrangements typical of real-world operations. To address these limitations, we introduce a synthetic data generation pipeline based on a high-fidelity Digital Twin of Algiers International Airport using NVIDIA Omniverse. The pipeline produces richly annotated data with oriented bounding boxes, capturing complex trolley formations, including tightly nested chains. We evaluate YOLO-OBB using five training strategies: real-only, synthetic-only, linear probing, full fine-tuning, and mixed training. This allows us to assess how synthetic data can complement limited real-world annotations. Our results show that mixed training with synthetic data and only 40 percent of real annotations matches or exceeds the full real-data baseline, achieving 0.94 mAP@50 and 0.77 mAP@50-95, while reducing annotation effort by 25 to 35 percent. Multi-seed experiments confirm strong reproducibility with a standard deviation below 0.01 on mAP@50, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of synthetic data for automated trolley detection.