Sketch-guided spatial adaptive normalization and high-level feature constraints based GAN image synthesis for steel strip defect detection data augmentation

Abstract Deep learning methods have made remarkable strides in surface defect detection. But, they heavily rely on large amount of training data, which can be a costly endeavor, especially for specific applications like steel strip surface defect detection, where acquiring and labeling large-scale data is impractical due to the rarity of certain defective categories in production environment. Hence, realistic defect image synthesis can greatly alleviate this issue. However, training image generation networks also demand substantial data, making image data augmentation merely an auxiliary effort. In this work, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based image synthesis framework. We selectively extract the defect edges of the original image as well as the background texture information, and use them as network input through the spatially-adaptive (de)normalization (SPADE) module. This enriches the input information, thus significantly reducing the amount of training data for GAN network in image generation, and enhancing the background details as well as the defect boundaries in the generated images. Additionally, we introduce a novel generator loss term that balances the similarity and perceptual fidelity between synthetic and real images by constraining high-level features at different feature levels. This provides more valuable information for data augmentation in training object detection models using synthetic images. Our experimental results demonstrate the sophistication of the proposed image synthesis method and its effectiveness in data augmentation for steel strip surface defect detection tasks.