A Data-Centric Approach to Design and Analysis of a Surface-Inspection System Based on Deep Learning in the Plastic Injection Molding Industry

Manufacturers are eager to replace the human inspector with automatic inspection systems to improve the competitive advantage by means of quality. However, some manufacturers have failed to apply the traditional vision system because of constraints in data acquisition and feature extraction. In this paper, we propose an inspection system based on deep learning for a tampon applicator producer that uses the applicator’s structural characteristics for data acquisition and uses state-of-the-art models for object detection and instance segmentation, YOLOv4 and YOLACT for feature extraction, respectively. During the on-site trial test, we experienced some False-Positive (FP) cases and found a possible Type I error. We used a data-centric approach to solve the problem by using two different data pre-processing methods, the Background Removal (BR) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). We have experimented with analyzing the effect of the methods on the inspection with the self-created dataset. We found that CLAHE increased Recall by 0.1 at the image level, and both CLAHE and BR improved Precision by 0.04–0.06 at the bounding box level. These results support that the data-centric approach might improve the detection rate. However, the data pre-processing techniques deteriorated the metrics used to measure the overall performance, such as F1-score and Average Precision (AP), even though we empirically confirmed that the malfunctions improved. With the detailed analysis of the result, we have found some cases that revealed the ambiguity of the decisions caused by the inconsistency in data annotation. Our research alerts AI practitioners that validating the model based only on the metrics may lead to a wrong conclusion