Multistage GAN for Fabric Defect Detection

Fabric defect detection is an intriguing but challenging topic. Many methods have been proposed for fabric defect detection, but these methods are still suboptimal due to the complex diversity of both fabric textures and defects. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based framework for fabric defect detection. Considering existing challenges in real-world applications, the proposed fabric defect detection system is capable of learning existing fabric defect samples and automatically adapting to different fabric textures during different application periods. Specifically, we customize a deep semantic segmentation network for fabric defect detection that can detect different defect types. Furthermore, we attempted to train a multistage GAN to synthesize reasonable defects in new defect-free samples. First, a texture-conditioned GAN is trained to explore the conditional distribution of defects given different texture backgrounds. Given a novel fabric, we aim to generate reasonable defective patches. Then, a GAN-based fusion network fuses the generated defects to specific locations. Finally, the well-trained multistage GAN continuously updates the existing fabric defect datasets and contributes to the fine-tuning of the semantic segmentation network to better detect defects under different conditions. Comprehensive experiments on various representative fabric samples are conducted to verify the detection performance of our proposed method.