A real-time detection system for multiscale surface defects of 3D printed ceramic parts based on deep learning

3D printed ceramic parts often have defects due to their inherent brittleness. These defects are of various scale sizes. Detecting these defects, especially with multiple sizes, is a challenging task in the field of detection. Furthermore, there is a lack of surface defect real-time detection systems suitable for industrial applications in this field. Based on this, this paper makes two contributions: the design and development of a real-time defect detection system, and the proposal of a multiscale defect detection method for 3D printed ceramic surfaces within this system. Firstly, the paper establishes the overall structure of the real-time detection system for surface defects on 3D printed ceramic components, and describes the hardware and software components of the system. On this basis, a dataset of ceramic surface defect images is collected and constructed. Then, experimental analyses point out the shortcomings of the You Only Look Once version-5 (YOLOv5) model for multiscale defect detection. To address the shortcomings, the YOLOv5 model is optimized from three aspects, resulting in the Deep separable convolution + residual network-SKNetwork-Efficient Channel Attention Network-YOLOv5 (DepRes-SK-ECA-YOLOv5) model for multiscale defect detection. This model improves the ability to extract and fuse features of defects at different scales. The experimental results show that the DepRes-SK-ECA-YOLOv5 model can achieve 93.5 %, 91.6 %, 94.3 %, and 0.198 s for Precision, Recall, mAP, and Speed for the test set, respectively. Finally, the paper designs the workflow for the system software. The system hardware and system software are integrated to form a real-time detection system. The performance of the detection system is verified through experiments.