AI Navigate

SortScrews: A Dataset and Baseline for Real-time Screw Classification

arXiv cs.CV / 3/16/2026

📰 NewsTools & Practical UsageModels & Research

Key Points

  • Introduces SortScrews, a new dataset for real-time screw type classification aimed at automated sorting in industrial contexts.
  • The dataset contains 560 RGB images at 512×512 resolution, covering six screw types plus a background class, with four capture settings to add mild variations in lighting and perspective.
  • A reusable data collection script is provided to help users build similar datasets for other hardware components, promoting reproducibility.
  • Baseline results are reported using transfer learning with EfficientNet-B0 and ResNet-18 pretrained on ImageNet, showing strong performance despite the small dataset and including a detailed failure analysis; code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub.

Abstract

Automatic identification of screw types is important for industrial automation, robotics, and inventory management. However, publicly available datasets for screw classification are scarce, particularly for controlled single-object scenarios commonly encountered in automated sorting systems. In this work, we introduce \textbf{SortScrews}, a dataset for casewise visual classification of screws. The dataset contains 560 RGB images at 512\times512 resolution covering six screw types and a background class. Images are captured using a standardized acquisition setup and include mild variations in lighting and camera perspective across four capture settings. To facilitate reproducible research and dataset expansion, we also provide a reusable data collection script that allows users to easily construct similar datasets for custom hardware components using inexpensive camera setups. We establish baseline results using transfer learning with EfficientNet-B0 and ResNet-18 classifiers pretrained on ImageNet. In addition, we conduct a well-explored failure analysis. Despite the limited dataset size, these lightweight models achieve strong classification accuracy, demonstrating that controlled acquisition conditions enable effective learning even with relatively small datasets. The dataset, collection pipeline, and baseline training code are publicly available at https://github.com/ATATC/SortScrews.