Design and Study of Pulsed Eddy Current Sensor for Detecting Surface Defects in Small-Diameter Bars.

Surface defect identification is a crucial task in many manufacturing systems, including automotive, aircraft, steel rolling, and precast concrete. Although image-based surface defect identification methods have been proposed, these methods usually have two limitations: images may lose partial information, such as depths of surface defects, and their precision is vulnerable to many factors, such as the inspection angle, light, color, noise, etc. Given that a three-dimensional (3D) point cloud can precisely represent the multidimensional structure of surface defects, we aim to detect and classify surface defects using a 3D point cloud. This has two major challenges: (i) the defects are often sparsely distributed over the surface, which makes their features prone to be hidden by the normal surface and (ii) different permutations and transformations of 3D point cloud may represent the same surface, so the proposed model needs to be permutation and transformation invariant. In this paper, a two-step surface defect identification approach is developed to investigate the defects’ patterns in 3D point cloud data. The proposed approach consists of an unsupervised method for defect detection and a multi-view deep learning model for defect classification, which can keep track of the features from both defective and non-defective regions. We prove that the proposed approach is invariant to different permutations and transformations. Two case studies are conducted for defect identification on the surfaces of synthetic aircraft fuselage and the real precast concrete specimen, respectively. The results show that our approach receives the best defect detection and classification accuracy compared with other benchmark methods.

Using deep learning to identify the depth of metal surface defects with narrowband SAW signals

Sanitary ceramic products, such as toilet and wash basin, are widely used in our daily life. Sanitary ceramics are expected to have some excellent physical properties, such as corrosion resistance, easy cleaning, and low water absorption. However, surface defects in sanitary ceramics are inevitable due to complex production processes and changing production environment. Therefore, surface defect detection must be performed in the manufacturing process of sanitary ceramics. There are many types of surface defects in sanitary ceramics, and different types of defects have large differences in characteristics and scales. Traditional detection methods with artificially designed features and classifiers are difficult to apply in this context. In addition, there are few studies on surface defect detection methods of sanitary ceramics based on deep neural networks. In this article, a lightweight real-time defect detection network based on the lightweight backbone MobileNetV3 is presented. The proposed network achieves multi-scale detection of surface defects in sanitary ceramics with a multi-layer feature pyramid. Combining region proposal network and anchor-free method, real-time defect detection is achieved. Finally, a detection head with channel attention structure and a low-level mixed feature classification strategy is used to perform defect classification with higher accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves at least 22.9% detection speed improvement and 35.0% average precision improvement while reducing memory consumption by at least 8.4% compared with the classic one-stage SSD, YOLO V3 and two-stage Faster R-CNN methods.

Surface defect detection aims to classify and locate a certain defect that exists in the target surface area. It is an important part of industrial quality inspection. Most of the research on surface defect detection are currently based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are more concerned with local information and lack global perception. Thus, CNNs are unable to effectively extract the defect features. In this paper, a defect detection method based on the Swin transformer is proposed. The structure of the Swin transformer has been fine-tuned so that it has five scales of output, making it more suitable for defect detection tasks with large variations in target size. A bi-directional feature pyramid network is used as the feature fusion part to efficiently fuse to the extracted features. The focal loss is used as a loss function to weight the hard- and easy-to-distinguish samples, potentially making the model fit the surface defect data better. To reduce the number of parameters in the model, a shared detection head was chosen for result prediction. Experiments were conducted on the flange surface defect dataset and the steel surface defect dataset, respectively. Compared with the classical CNNs target detection algorithm, our method improves the mean average precision (mAP) by about 15.4%, while the model volume and detection speed are essentially the same as those of the CNNs-based method. The experimental results show that our proposed method is more competitive compared with CNNs-based methods and has some generality for different types of defects.

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) has become an essential structural material in aerospace, new energy, rail transportation, and other fields due to its lightweight and high-strength properties. However, its complex manufacturing processes and demanding service environments can lead to various types of damage on both the surface and inside the material, significantly compromising safety. Existing detection techniques often adopt a step-by-step inspection mode, which results in complex processes and makes it difficult to achieve cross-dimensional correlation analysis of defects, leading to blind spots in structural health assessment. To address these issues, this paper proposes a method for simultaneous detection of surface and subsurface defects in CFRP based on infrared polarization imaging. First, we developed an infrared polarization imaging-based defect detection system and collected a CFRP defect dataset of samples containing various surface and subsurface defects. Then, we proposed a surface and subsurface defect detection network, which integrates extracted thermal diffusion features and polarization features to decouple and enhance surface and subsurface features. Through the constraints of multi-task defect detection, simultaneous detection of surface and subsurface defects is achieved. The experiments on the collected CFRP defect dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Surface defect inspection methods have proven effective in addressing casting quality control tasks. However, traditional inspection methods often struggle to achieve high-precision detection of surface defects in castings with similar characteristics and minor scales. The study introduces DES-YOLO, a novel real-time method for detecting castings' surface defects. In the DES-YOLO model, we incorporate the DSC-Darknet backbone network and global attention mechanism (GAM) module to enhance the identification of defect target features. These additions are essential for overcoming the challenge posed by the high similarity among defect characteristics, such as shrinkage holes and slag holes, which can result in decreased detection accuracy. An enhanced pyramid pooling module is also introduced to improve feature representation for small defective parts through multi-layer pooling. We integrate Slim-Neck and SIoU bounding box regression loss functions for real-time detection in actual production scenarios. These functions reduce memory overhead and enable real-time detection of surface defects in castings. Experimental findings demonstrate that the DES-YOLO model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.6% on the CSD-DET dataset and a single-image inference speed of 3.9 milliseconds. The proposed method proves capable of swiftly and accurately accomplishing real-time detection of surface defects in castings.

Internal defects detection and classification in hollow cylindrical surfaces using single shot detection and MobileNet

Various methods of detecting surface defects are being used in automated industrial manufacturing environments. This work presents the design and development of a laser charged couple device (CCD) displacement scanning system. The surface defect detection method using a laser CCD displacement sensor is derived from an idea in which surface defects such as cracks, inclusions and holes of three‐dimensional morphology characteristics are compared to normal surface especially in continuous casting slabs. Some novel research methods have been applied to develop the surface defect detection system used: first, getting a one‐dimensional distance matrix along transverse direction and a two‐dimensional matrix combining with a certain moving speed through the laser CCD displacement sensor; second, obtaining the slab surface profile and mapping to a greyscale image and finally, obtaining the surface defect regions by an image processing and searching algorithm and quantitatively detecting slab surface defect shape and depth. The research results in the lab trials have shown that the methodology proposed is effective to detect two‐dimensional defect size and reconstruct a three‐dimensional surface defect shape. At the same time, it is also able to accurately locate and identify surface defects and realise automatic surface defect non‐destructive detection online, and provides a theoretical base and technology idea for further studying surface defects online inspection for hot continuous casting slab.

Electrolytic capacitor surface defect detection based on deep convolution neural network

Mechanical parts often have surface defects such as scratches, cracks and pits during the production process, which seriously affect product quality and service life. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a method for detecting and quantifying surface defects of mechanical parts based on image processing. First, this paper uses high-resolution image acquisition technology to obtain surface images of mechanical parts, and improves image quality through preprocessing steps. Then, this paper uses edge detection, morphological operations, and image segmentation algorithms to extract the features of surface defects, thereby realizing automatic identification of defective areas. Finally, this paper combines the Faster R-CNN (Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network) algorithm to further refine the classification and quantification of defects and obtain the specific location, size and type of defects. Experimental results show that among the 500 mechanical parts samples tested, the proposed method has a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.93 in surface defect detection. Compared with other image processing methods, this method has significantly improved defect detection accuracy and speed. Especially when processing higher-resolution images, the Faster R-CNN model can achieve efficient defect classification and quantification to meet the needs of real-time detection in industrial production.

Wind energy is a renewable resource with abundant reserves, and its sustainable development and utilization are crucial. The components of wind turbines, particularly the blades and various surfaces, require meticulous defect detection and maintenance due to their significance. The operational status of wind turbine generators directly impacts the efficiency and safe operation of wind farms. Traditional surface defect detection methods for wind turbines often involve manual operations, which suffer from issues such as high subjectivity, elevated risks, low accuracy, and inefficiency. The emergence of computer vision technologies based on deep learning has provided a novel approach to surface defect detection in wind turbines. However, existing datasets designed for wind turbine surface defects exhibit overall category scarcity and an imbalance in samples between categories. The algorithms designed face challenges, with low detection rates for small samples. Hence, this study first constructs a benchmark dataset for wind turbine surface defects comprising seven categories that encompass all common surface defects. Simultaneously, a wind turbine surface defect detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv5 is designed. Initially, a multi-scale copy-paste data augmentation method is proposed, introducing scale factors to randomly resize the bounding boxes before copy-pasting. This alleviates sample imbalances and significantly enhances the algorithm’s detection capabilities for targets of different sizes. Subsequently, a dynamic label assignment strategy based on the Hungarian algorithm is introduced that calculates the matching costs by weighing different losses, enhancing the network’s ability to learn positive and negative samples. To address overfitting and misrecognition resulting from strong data augmentation, a two-stage progressive training method is proposed, aiding the model’s natural convergence and improving generalization performance. Furthermore, a multi-scenario negative-sample-guided learning method is introduced that involves incorporating unlabeled background images from various scenarios into training, guiding the model to learn negative samples and reducing misrecognition. Finally, slicing-aided hyper inference is introduced, facilitating large-scale inference for wind turbine surface defects in actual industrial scenarios. The improved algorithm demonstrates a 3.1% increase in the mean average precision (mAP) on the custom dataset, achieving 95.7% accuracy in mAP_50 (the IoU threshold is half of the mAP). Notably, the mAPs for small, medium, and large targets increase by 18.6%, 16.4%, and 6.8%, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the enhanced algorithm exhibits high detection accuracy, providing a new and more efficient solution for the field of wind turbine surface defect detection.

When using visual image technology to detect surface defects of sealing rings for aerospace, traditional image processing algorithms are constrained by surface defects types, scale differences, illumination variations, and non-uniformities of surface image. As a result, the application of each algorithm is relatively limited. To solve the problems, a general deep learning algorithm for surface defects detection of sealing rings is proposed. Texture features of defects, gradient features of edges and contour features are selected as main features of surface defects of sealing rings differentiated from the background, and a new cascade modular backbone network is design for extraction of these features. The average aspect ratio of label box for defects among dataset of defect images of sealing rings is calculated and aspect ratio distribution is counted to obtain the proportional parameter for generating prior box. Based on the calculated proportional parameters of prior box and scale features of defects, multi-scale defects detection network is designed. Meanwhile, defects classification and position regression compound loss function are defined. In the end, weighting parameters of the network are updated on the basis of end-to-end training. Experimental result shows that the accuracy of proposed algorithm for defects detection reach 94.03% under the condition that the original defects sample images is 107 and confidence is 0.6. Compared with RefineDet network, the depth of backbone network of feature extraction increases by 78% while the scale of parameters reduces by 84.82% and the accuracy of defects detection reduces by 3.01%.

At present, the detection of surface defects of paper-plastic composite bags still mainly depends on manual visual inspection, which is very inefficient and easy to cause false detection. Based on the algorithm which combines edge detection and adaptive region growth, binary images of the surface defect areas is extracted, six types of shape features and seven types of invariant moment features are defined by calculation as the basis to complete the effective extraction of the surface features, then a paper-plastic composite bags surface defect detection platform is built to complete the defect detection experiment, the defect screening experiment was completed by the rapid screening method of its surface defect image based on gradient projection difference. At the same time, based on Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization, and Grey Wolf Optimization, parameter optimization models of Support Vector Machine were established, respectively. Through experimental comparison, some results show that the defect detection and classification accuracy rate reach 96.83% based on the GA, and the detection speed with the screening method is 3.75 times faster than that without the screening method. Therefore, the reliability of the image classification and screening method for bags surface defects proposed in this study is verified.

QRNet: Query-based reparameterization net for real-time detection of power adapter surface defects

A nondestructive testing method for detecting surface defects of Si3N4-Bearing cylindrical rollers based on an optimized convolutional neural network