Mobile-Deeplab: a lightweight pixel segmentation-based method for fabric defect detection

Fabric defect detection has always been a key issue, and it positively correlated its efficiency with productivity. From manual visual methods to machine vision and deep learning-based techniques, a variety of methods have been studied to improve production efficiency and product quality. Although deep learning-based methods have proven to be powerful tools for segmentation, there are still many pressing issues that need to be addressed in practical applications. First, the scarcity of defective samples compared to normal samples can cause data imbalance and thus affect accuracy. Second, high real-time performance is also required in the actual detection process. To overcome these problems, we propose a high real-time convolutional neural network, named Mobile-Deeplab, to implement end-to-end defect segmentation. In addition, we proposed a loss function to consider the fabric image sample imbalance problem. We evaluated the performance of the model with two public structured datasets and three self-constructed structured datasets. The experimental results show that the segmentation method has better segmentation accuracy than other segmentation models, which verifies the segmentation effect of the method. In addition, 87.11 frames per second on a $$256\times 256$$ 256 × 256 size image meet industrial real-time requirements.