Title
Multiscale Feature-Clustering-Based Fully Convolutional Autoencoder for Fast Accurate Visual Inspection of Texture Surface Defects
Abstract
Visual inspection of texture surface defects is still a challenging task in the industrial automation field due to the tremendous changes in the appearance of various surface textures. Current visual inspection methods cannot simultaneously and efficiently inspect various types of texture defects due to either the low discriminative capabilities of handcrafted features or their time-consuming sliding-window strategy. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised multiscale feature-clustering-based fully convolutional autoencoder (MS-FCAE) method that efficiently and accurately inspects various types of texture defects based on a small number of defect-free texture samples. The proposed MS-FCAE method utilizes multiple FCAE subnetworks at different scale levels to reconstruct several textured background images. The residual images are obtained by subtracting these texture backgrounds from the input image individually; then, they are fused into one defect image. To maximize the efficiency, each FCAE subnetwork utilizes fully convolutional neural networks to extract the original feature maps directly from the input images. Meanwhile, each FCAE subnetwork performs feature clustering to improve the discriminant power of the encoded feature maps. The proposed MS-FCAE method is evaluated on several texture surface inspection data sets both qualitatively and quantitatively. This method achieves a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Precision</italic> of 92.0% while requiring only 82 ms for input images of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1920\times 1080$ </tex-math></inline-formula> pixels. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that MS-FCAE achieves highly efficient and state-of-the-art inspection accuracy. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</italic> —Most conventional visual inspection methods can address only one specific type of texture defect, while multiscale feature-clustering-based fully convolutional autoencoder (MS-FCAE) can simultaneously and accurately inspect various types of texture surface defects, such as those of thin-film transistor liquid crystal displays, wood, fabrics, and ceramic tiles. Furthermore, MS-FCAE requires only a small number of surface texture samples to learn a robust network model, and its training requires no defect samples. This is extremely important for industrial applications because identifying and labeling defect samples is difficult. Moreover, MS-FCAE can be applied to online visual inspection utilizing a graphics processing unit-based parallel processing strategy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/tase.2018.2886031
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Inspection,Surface texture,Visualization,Feature extraction,Image segmentation,Fabrics,Surface treatment
Visual inspection,Autoencoder,Pattern recognition,Computer science,Convolutional neural network,Visualization,Image segmentation,Feature extraction,Control engineering,Artificial intelligence,Pixel,Cluster analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
3
1545-5955
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hua Yang1205.52
Yifan Chen25819.82
Kaiyou Song3113.30
Zhouping Yin422829.67