Managing Cost–Stability Trade-Offs in Industrial Object Detection: A Unified Decision Support Framework

Object detection is a core component of industrial vision systems in manufacturing, infrastructure monitoring, and safety-critical sensing. While the mean average precision (mAP) averages the performance over all confidence thresholds, real-world deployment demands committing to a single operating threshold under score imprecision, distribution shifts, and asymmetric—often only approximately known—error costs. From a soft-computing perspective, deployment should explicitly manage this uncertainty rather than rely on a static validation optimum. We propose domain-specific and robust localization recall precision (DSR-LRP), a three-phase decision-support framework. The framework elicits soft domain preferences—such as asymmetric error costs, tolerable localization imprecision, and expected perturbations—from practitioner knowledge and encodes them as three quantitative parameters (k, αIoU, β). A cost-sensitive, threshold-local objective aggregates the performance within a robustness band around each candidate threshold, jointly capturing the accuracy and local stability. Finally, it yields an interpretable recommendation package comprising the operating threshold, its DSR-LRP score, and visual evidence. Experiments on four practical datasets (blood cell screening, wildfire smoke monitoring, pothole detection, and semiconductor sensor inspection) showed that DSR-LRP consistently selected operating thresholds that were robust and cost-aligned. For example, in pothole detection, an LRP-optimal threshold degraded by 15.6% under simulated shifts, while the DSR-LRP recommendation changed by only 1.8%. DSR-LRP complements global metrics such as the mAP and provides a soft-computing-oriented tool for reliable, evidence-driven deployment of industrial object detectors.