Efficient surface defect detection using self-supervised learning strategy and segmentation network

Surface defect detection plays a crucial role in the production process to ensure product quality. With the development of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, traditional manual defect detection becomes no longer satisfactory, and deep learning-based technologies are gradually applied to surface defect detection tasks. However, the application of deep learning-based defect detection methods in actual production lines is often constrained by insufficient data, expensive annotations, and limited computing resources. Detection methods are expected to require fewer annotations as well as smaller computational consumption. In this paper, we propose the Self-Supervised Efficient Defect Detector (SEDD), a high-efficiency defect defector based on self-supervised learning strategy and image segmentation. The self-supervised learning strategy with homographic enhancement is employed to ensure that defective samples with annotations are no longer needed in our pipeline, while competitive performance can still be achieved. Based on this strategy, a new surface defect simulation dataset generation method is proposed to solve the problem of insufficient training data. Also, a lightweight structure with the attention module is designed to reduce the computation cost without incurring accuracy. Furthermore, a multi-task auxiliary strategy is employed to reduce segmentation errors of edges. The proposed model has been evaluated with three typical datasets and achieves competitive performance compared with other tested methods, with 98.40% AUC and 74.84% AP on average. Experimental results show that our network has the smallest computational consumption and the highest running speed among the networks tested.