Material classification in the wild: Do synthesized training data generalise better than real-world training data?

We question the dominant role of real-world training images in the field of material classification by investigating whether synthesized data can generalise more effectively than real-world data. Experimental results on three challenging real-world material databases show that the best performing pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures can achieve up to 91.03% mean average precision when classifying materials in cross-dataset scenarios. We demonstrate that synthesized data achieve an improvement on mean average precision when used as training data and in conjunction with pre-trained CNN architectures, which spans from ∼ 5% to ∼ 19% across three widely used material databases of real-world images.