Enhancing Computer Vision Model Generalization in Warehouse Facilities: A Case Study on Anomaly Detection in Vertical Material Handling Systems

Deploying computer vision models in Warehouse Facilities traditionally requires extensive resources for camera mounting, image collection, annotation, training, and deployment - a process often needing repetition in each new environment due to camera mounting constraints and environmental variability. This paper explores an innovative approach to streamline this process by conducting the standard procedure solely in a laboratory setting, focusing on vertical material handling systems and anomaly detection in forks of the systems. Through extensive experimentation, we have found that combining optimal camera placement, strategic image triggering, careful model selection and model ensemble enables effective generalization from laboratory conditions to diverse warehouse facilities environments, potentially transforming warehouse automation implementation by simplifying warehouse facilities deployment to just camera mounting, image collection, and model deployment, thereby saving significant resources and time typically spent on image annotation and model retraining. This is an experimental research study and not a production deployment.

Training-Free Object-Agnostic Jam Detection in Fulfillment Centers

In fulfillment centers, diverse objects move continuously from inbound to outbound operations and can become jammed due to excessive conveyor friction, incorrect orientation, or mechanical failures. Traditional jam detection approaches rely on object detection models to identify objects, followed by tracking algorithms (such as IoU overlap and Kalman filtering) to monitor motion over time. This pipeline requires thousands of manual annotations, consuming approximately two weeks of effort, and is limited to annotated object classes. We present a training-free, object-agnostic jam detection method that eliminates the need for labeled data. Our approach uniformly samples reference points within the monitoring region when no objects are present. As objects occlude these points, we detect motion. When a sufficient fraction remains occluded beyond a temporal threshold, we classify the event as a jam. Unlike conventional point tracking--which treats occlusion as a failure case--our approach repurposes occlusion as a detection signal, monitoring whether reference points remain persistently occluded rather than tracking where they move. Our experimental evaluation on 1,069 videos demonstrates that AllTracker achieves 100.00% precision and 93.33% F1 score, significantly outperforming classical sparse tracking methods while maintaining training-free deployment. This approach offers three key advantages: (1) no training data or manual annotations, (2) object-agnostic generalization to arbitrary object types, and (3) significantly reduced development time.