Synthetic Data Augmentation Using GAN For Improved Automated Visual Inspection
This addresses quality control challenges for manufacturing companies by improving automated inspection, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN and data augmentation techniques.
The study tackled data imbalance in automated visual inspection by comparing supervised and unsupervised defect detection and using GANs for data augmentation, achieving AUC ROC scores of 0.9898 or higher even with only 25% defective images and reducing labeling workload by over 50% with unsupervised methods.
Quality control is a crucial activity performed by manufacturing companies to ensure their products conform to the requirements and specifications. The introduction of artificial intelligence models enables to automate the visual quality inspection, speeding up the inspection process and ensuring all products are evaluated under the same criteria. In this research, we compare supervised and unsupervised defect detection techniques and explore data augmentation techniques to mitigate the data imbalance in the context of automated visual inspection. Furthermore, we use Generative Adversarial Networks for data augmentation to enhance the classifiers' discriminative performance. Our results show that state-of-the-art unsupervised defect detection does not match the performance of supervised models but can be used to reduce the labeling workload by more than 50%. Furthermore, the best classification performance was achieved considering GAN-based data generation with AUC ROC scores equal to or higher than 0,9898, even when increasing the dataset imbalance by leaving only 25\% of the images denoting defective products. We performed the research with real-world data provided by Philips Consumer Lifestyle BV.