Automated Aircraft Visual Inspection with Artificial Data Generation Enabled Deep Learning

Aircraft visual inspection, which is essential to daily maintenance of an aircraft, is expensive and time-consuming to perform. Augmenting trained maintenance technicians with automated UAVs to collect and analyze images for aircraft inspection is an active research topic and a potential application of CNNs. Training datasets for niche research topics such as aircraft visual inspection are small and challenging to produce, and the manual process of labeling these datasets often produces subjective annotations. Recently, researchers have produced several successful applications of artificially generated datasets with domain randomization for training CNNs for real-world computer vision problems. The research outlined herein builds upon this idea to create an artificial data generation pipeline inside Blender and generate an artificial dataset to train an instance-segmentation CNN model for car damage detection. This research then evaluates the real-world performance of several models, each pre-trained on the COCO dataset and fine-tuned on custom generated artificial dataset