Few-Shot Steel Surface Defect Detection

Deep learning-based algorithms have been widely employed to build reliable steel surface defect detection systems, which are important for manufacturing. The performance of deep learning models relies heavily on abundant annotated data. Nevertheless, the labeled image volume in industrial datasets is often limited. The scarcity of training data would lead to poor detection precision. To tackle this issue, we propose the first few-shot defect detection framework. Through pre-training models using data relevant to the target task, the proposed framework can produce well-trained networks with a few labeled images. Meanwhile, we release the first publicly available few-shot defect detection dataset, namely few-shot NEU-DET (FS-ND). This dataset will serve as a fair benchmark for various contrasting methods. Afterward, we analyze the characteristics of steel surface defect detection. It is observed that the limited amount of training data can hardly cover the data distributions in practical applications. Given this observation, we develop two domain generalization strategies that enhance the appearance and scale diversity of extracted features. Furthermore, it is found that noise existing in industrial images could result in the collapse of models. To address this problem, we devise a noise regularization strategy that improves the robustness of trained models significantly. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework. The results indicate that our framework outperforms the contrasted baseline by around 15 mAP and achieves comparable performance with models trained using abundant data.