Abstract:
Detection of surface defects in manufacturing systems is crucial for product quality. Detection of surface defects with high accuracy can prevent financial and time losses. Recently, efforts to develop high-performance automatic surface defect detection systems using computer vision and machine-learning methods have become prominent. In line with this purpose, this paper proposed a novel approach based on Depth-wise Squeeze and Excitation Block-based Efficient-Unet (DSEB-EUNet) for automatic surface defect detection. The proposed model consists of an encoder–decoder, the basic structure of the Unet architecture, and a Depth-wise Squeeze and Excitation Block added to the skip-connection of Unet. First, in the encoder part of the proposed model, low-level and high-level features were obtained by the EfficientNet network. Then, these features were transferred to the Depth-wise Squeeze and Excitation Block. The proposed DSEB based on the combination of Squeeze-Excitation and Depth-wise Separable Convolution enabled to reveal of critical information by weighting the features with a lightweight gating mechanism for surface defect detection. Besides, in the decoder part of the proposed model, the structure called Multi-level Feature Concatenated Block (MFCB) transferred the weighted features to the last layers without losing spatial detail. Finally, pixel-level defect detection was performed using the sigmoid function. The proposed model was tested using three general datasets for surface defect detection. In experimental works, the best F1-scores for MT, DAGM, and AITEX datasets using the proposed DSEB-EUNet architecture were 89.20%, 85.97%, and 90.39%, respectively. These results showed the proposed model outperforms higher performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.