IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jmathe/v12y2024i16p2473-d1453809.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Automatic Foreign Matter Segmentation System for Superabsorbent Polymer Powder: Application of Diffusion Adversarial Representation Learning

Author

Listed:
  • Ssu-Han Chen

    (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan
    Center for Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan)

  • Meng-Jey Youh

    (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan
    These authors contributed equally to this work.)

  • Yan-Ru Chen

    (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan
    These authors contributed equally to this work.)

  • Jer-Huan Jang

    (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan)

  • Hung-Yi Chen

    (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan)

  • Hoang-Giang Cao

    (Center for Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan)

  • Yang-Shen Hsueh

    (SAP Plant, Tairylan Division, Formosa Plastics Corporation, Chiayi 616, Taiwan)

  • Chuan-Fu Liu

    (SAP Plant, Tairylan Division, Formosa Plastics Corporation, Chiayi 616, Taiwan)

  • Kevin Fong-Rey Liu

    (Department of Safety, Health and Environmental Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan)

Abstract

In current industries, sampling inspections of the quality of powders, such as superabsorbent polymers (SAPs) still are conducted via visual inspection. The size of samples and foreign matter are around 500 μm, making them difficult for humans to identify. An automatic foreign matter detection system for powder has been developed in the present study. The powder samples can be automatically delivered, distributed, and recycled, and images of them are captured through the hardware of the system, while the identification software of this system was developed based on diffusion adversarial representation learning (DARL). The background image is a foreign-matter-free powder image with an input image size of 1024 × 1024 × 3. Since DARL includes adversarial segmentation, a diffusion process, and synthetic image generation, the DARL model was trained using a diffusion block with the employment of a U-Net attention mechanism and a spatial-adaptation de-normalization (SPADE) layer through the adoption of a loss function from a vanilla generative adversarial network (GAN). This model was then compared with supervised models such as a fully convolutional network (FCN), U-Net, and DeepLABV3+, as well as with an unsupervised Otsu threshold segmentation. It should be noted that only 10% of the training samples were utilized for the DARL to learn and the intersection over union (IoU) of the DARL can reach up to 80.15%, which is much higher than the 59.00%, 53.47%, 49.39%, and 30.08% for the Otsu threshold segmentation, FCN, U-Net, and DeepLABV3+ models. Therefore, the performance of the model developed in the present study would not be degraded due to an insufficient number of samples containing foreign matter. In practical applications, there is no need to collect, label, and design features for a large number of foreign matter samples before using the developed system.

Suggested Citation

  • Ssu-Han Chen & Meng-Jey Youh & Yan-Ru Chen & Jer-Huan Jang & Hung-Yi Chen & Hoang-Giang Cao & Yang-Shen Hsueh & Chuan-Fu Liu & Kevin Fong-Rey Liu, 2024. "Automatic Foreign Matter Segmentation System for Superabsorbent Polymer Powder: Application of Diffusion Adversarial Representation Learning," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 12(16), pages 1-22, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:12:y:2024:i:16:p:2473-:d:1453809
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/12/16/2473/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/12/16/2473/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:12:y:2024:i:16:p:2473-:d:1453809. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.