Binary neural network for automated visual surface defect detection

Abstract As is well-known, defects precisely affect the lives and functions of the machines in which they occur, and even cause potentially catastrophic casualties. Therefore, quality assessment before mounting is an indispensable requirement for factories. Apart from the recognition accuracy, current networks suffer from excessive computing complexity, making it of great difficulty to deploy in the manufacturing process. To address these issues, this paper introduces binary networks into the area of surface defect detection for the first time, for the reason that binary networks prohibitively constrain weight and activation to +1 and −1. The proposed Bi-ShuffleNet and U-BiNet utilize binary convolution layers and activations in low bitwidth, in order to reach comparable performances while incurring much less computational cost. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-life NEU and Magnetic Tile datasets, revealing the least OPs required and little accuracy decline. When classifying the defects, Bi-ShuffleNet yields comparable results to counterpart networks, with at least 2× inference complexity reduction. Defect segmentation results indicate similar observations. Some network design rules in defect detection and binary networks are also summarized in this paper