An evolutionary classifier for steel surface defects with small sample set

Abstract Nowadays, surface defect detection systems for steel strip have replaced traditional artificial inspection systems, and automatic defect detection systems offer good performance when the sample set is large and the model is stable. However, the trained model does work well when a new production line is initiated with different equipment, processes, or detection devices. These variables make just tiny changes to the real-world model but have a significant impact on the classification result. To overcome these problems, we propose an evolutionary classifier with a Bayes kernel (BYEC) that can be adjusted with a small sample set to better adapt the model for a new production line. First, abundant features were introduced to cover detailed information about the defects. Second, we constructed a series of support vector machines (SVMs) with a random subspace of the features. Then, a Bayes classifier was trained as an evolutionary kernel fused with the results from the sub-SVM to form an integrated classifier. Finally, we proposed a method to adjust the Bayes evolutionary kernel with a small sample set. We compared the performance of this method to various algorithms; experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be adjusted with a small sample set to fit the changed model. Experimental evaluations were conducted to demonstrate the robustness, low requirement for samples, and adaptiveness of the proposed method