Alternative Data Augmentation for Industrial Monitoring using Adversarial Learning
This work addresses data scarcity in specialized manufacturing environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN and image-to-image translation methods for a specific industry use case.
The paper tackles the problem of limited training data for semantic segmentation in industrial monitoring by proposing a novel data augmentation strategy using adversarial learning, applied to surface monitoring of carbon fibers, where the trigonometric function method outperformed the WGAN model but both showed only small deviations from traditional augmentation.
Visual inspection software has become a key factor in the manufacturing industry for quality control and process monitoring. Semantic segmentation models have gained importance since they allow for more precise examination. These models, however, require large image datasets in order to achieve a fair accuracy level. In some cases, training data is sparse or lacks of sufficient annotation, a fact that especially applies to highly specialized production environments. Data augmentation represents a common strategy to extend the dataset. Still, it only varies the image within a narrow range. In this article, a novel strategy is proposed to augment small image datasets. The approach is applied to surface monitoring of carbon fibers, a specific industry use case. We apply two different methods to create binary labels: a problem-tailored trigonometric function and a WGAN model. Afterwards, the labels are translated into color images using pix2pix and used to train a U-Net. The results suggest that the trigonometric function is superior to the WGAN model. However, a precise examination of the resulting images indicate that WGAN and image-to-image translation achieve good segmentation results and only deviate to a small degree from traditional data augmentation. In summary, this study examines an industry application of data synthesization using generative adversarial networks and explores its potential for monitoring systems of production environments. \keywords{Image-to-Image Translation, Carbon Fiber, Data Augmentation, Computer Vision, Industrial Monitoring, Adversarial Learning.