Deep-learning-based computer vision system for surface-defect detection

Automating optical-inspection systems using machine learning has become an interesting and promising area of research. In particular, the deep-learning approaches have shown a very high and direct impact on the application domain of visual inspection. This paper presents a complete inspection system for automated quality control of a specific industrial product. Both hardware and software part of the system are described, with machine vision used for image acquisition and pre-processing followed by a segmentation-based deep-learning model used for surface-defect detection. The deep-learning model is compared with the state-of-the-art commercial software, showing that the proposed approach outperforms the related method on the specific domain of surface-crack detection. Experiments are performed on a real-world quality-control case and demonstrate that the deep-learning model can be successfully used even when only 33 defective training samples are available. This makes the deep-learning method practical for use in industry where the number of available defective samples is limited.