S2D2Net: An Improved Approach For Robust Steel Surface Defects Diagnosis With Small Sample Learning

Surface defect recognition of products is a necessary process to guarantee the quality of industrial production. This paper proposes a hybrid model, S2D2Net (Steel Surface Defect Diagnosis Network), for an efficient and robust inspection of the steel surface during the manufacturing process. The S2D2Net uses a pre-trained ImageNet model as a feature extractor and learns a Capsule Network over the extracted features. The experimental results on a publicly available steel surface defect dataset (NEU) show that S2D2Net achieved 99.17% accuracy with minimal training data and improved by 9.59% over its closest competitor based on GAN. S2D2Net proved its robustness by achieving 94.7% accuracy on a diversity enhanced dataset, ENEU, and improved by 3.6% over its closest competitor. It has better, robust recognition performance compared to other state-of-the-art DNN-based detectors.