Artificial Intelligence for Product Quality Inspection in Manufacturing Industry - Online Detection of Edge Defects on Inorganic Solid Material

The detection and localization of small and tiny defects on high-resolution images is considered one of the main challenges in the field of computer vision. In the manufacturing industry, the production speed and cycle time are considered the major target of a production process. For such reason, automated quality detection is getting even more complexified by the need of performing defect detection on moving products. In this work, we investigate the performance of a small defect detection process on high-scale images by utilizing state-of-the-art object detection architectures and a set of the hardware setup. Taking as a target the detection of defects on moving products, and using a small training set and a procedure of data augmentation, we demonstrated that such a challenge can be solved using machine learning and artificial intelligence coupled with domain knowledge in machine vision hardware selection and design. The sections of this paper are organized into two parts, the first part describes the problem, the existing and related works, and a summary of the existing methodologies. The second part of the paper is centered on our case study for which we started by describing the adopted methodology, the vision system design, the data acquisition and processing, the model training, and the obtained results, then it is concluded with a discussion of the model outputs and the listing of challenges that still to be studied in future works.