Proceedings of the 41st Chinese Control Conference

July 25-27, 2022, Hefei, China

A Deep Learning Based Surface Defect Detection Method with

Coarse Granularity for Corrugated Fuel Tubes
Zongze Wu1,2 , Zizhuo Zhang1 , Jun Xu1 Qiang Ling*1,2
1. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China;
E-mail: qling@ustc.edu.cn.
2. Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei 230031, China.

Abstract:
Surface defect detection is a crucial task to achieve the automation goal in industrial production process. Nowadays, owing to
the rapid development of computer vision, lots of detection methods based on deep learning have been proposed and applied in
industrial manufacturing process. However, different from other deep learning tasks, the rarity of labeled defect training samples
makes it a great challenge to attain expected performance for the surface defect detection of corrugated fuel tubes. To address this
issue, this paper proposes a network with rougher detection granularity to obtain higher accuracy and recall rate. The boundary
of detected defects will be less precise, which, however, is much less important than the gain of detection accuracy and is a
tolerable cost. Experiments on two different datasets are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method.

Key Words: Deep learning, Surface defect detection, Coarse granularity

1 Introduction auxiliary detection. Therefore, the research of defect detec-

Quality supervision is a crucial part in industrial produc-
tion since it is necessary to ensure the quality of products
strictly while improving the production efficiency and guar-
anteeing the brand image. In the past decades, with the de-
velopment and popularization of industrial automation tech-
nology, the main labor consumption in industrial production
is gradually shifting from production to quality supervision.
Therefore, it tends to be a great demand for automatic defect
detection technology with effective algorithms to reduce the
waste of labor resources.
Over the recent years, benefiting from the rapid develop-
ment of computer vision owing to deep learning, more and
more visual perception algorithms have been applied to in-
dustrial inspection operations in order to detect the surface
defects of industrial products instead of human eyes. Most of
the existing defect detection algorithms utilizing deep learn-
ing are based on target detection method or semantic seg-
mentation algorithm. The target detection method can only
get the position and size of defects, but cannot perceive the
shape of defects. It requires plenty of labeled data for train-
ing to avoid serious problem of missing detection. The se-
mantic segmentation method can obtain the overall location
and shape information of defects. However, the characteris-
tic of pixel-by-pixel classification and the general situation
that some defects are similar to the background will lead to
many false detections and increase the cost of image label-
ing. Besides, the industrial products produced by differen-
t manufacturing processes have different attributes, which
makes it difficult to develop a general defect detection al-
gorithm to deal with all kinds of industrial products. In spite
of kinds of shortcomings and challenges, defect detections
methods based on computer vision are effective to reduce the
manpower consumption through detection automation and
This work was supported in part the Key Science and Technology
Project of Anhui Province under Grant 202203f07020002, and in part by
the Technological Innovation Project for New Energy and Intelligent Net-
worked Automobile Industry of Anhui Province(Research, Development
and Industrialization of Intelligent Cameras).
tion algorithm is favored by the industry and tends to be a
hotspot of computer vision.
The existing defect detection methods mainly include tar-
get detection and semantic segmentation, among which se-
mantic segmentation based algorithms are more common in
application. Bian X et al.[[1]] proposed a defect detection
algorithm based on semantic segmentation algorithm. They
resize the input images into different scales, then send those
images into corresponding models built for different scales,
the obtained results will be integrated and then sent into
a new network to get the final segmentation results. This
method works with a large network structure, causing low
calculation speed, but effectively address the problem of d-
ifferent defect scales. Chen J et al.[[2]] combined SSD[[3]],
YOLO[[4]] and other classical target detection algorithms
based on bounding box to construct a cascade network with
different detection levels from rough to precise, realizing the
process of defect location to classification. Qiu L[[5]] com-
bined these two algorithms. They first roughly separated the
region potentially containing defects with a segmentation al-
gorithm, after which they applied the target detection method
to the segmentation results so as to obtain the location of de-
fects with high possibility. In this way, a more accurate dis-
tribution of defects was obtained. Finally, they conducted a
second segmentation to these locations along with a smooth-
ing operation to obtain the more precise results.
These algorithms have achieved good results for large in-
dustrial products with significant defects, but not for small
scale defect target detection, which is common in the pro-
duction process of corrugated fuel tubes. Most of the defects
in the inner surface of corrugated fuel tubes are small tar-
gets. Such small defect targets occupy only a small area in
the whole image and are difficult to be captured by semantic
segmentation network. Meanwhile, for small target samples,
the usual target detection algorithms are difficult to achieve
the expected detection precision under a small number of
labeled samples. Therefore, it is hard for target detection al-
gorithms to detect the defects with small area of the inner

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 Fig. 1: Architecture of the proposed model

Fig. 2: Inner surface defects of corrugated fuel tubes

surface of corrugated fuel tubes. Except for the small target-
s, another problem is the complex background. Because the
inner surface of the corrugated fuel tubes is undulating and
has a large amount of shadow area, the pixel-level seman-
tic segmentation tends to classify the shadow part as defects,
resulting in false detection.
The main contributions of this paper are as below:
1) In this paper, a high precision corrugated fuel tubes de-
fect detection model is designed, which greatly improves the
detection accuracy of the inner surface defects of corrugated
fuel tubes by using the mechanism of multi-head attention,
manual Gaussian weight and block classification.
2)Due to the uneven distribution of defects, we make s-
tatistics on the defect center positions of the corrugated fuel
tubes in the images, set the manual weight that follows the
Gaussian distribution, and increase the weights of the po-
sitions with frequent defects to reduce the rate of missing
detection.
3)At the same time, in view of defects with variable
shapes, we use multi-head attention module to extract more
abundant features for defects of different shapes, which im-
proves the classification accuracy of blocks, and reduces the
false detection rate and missing detection rate of the model.
4)The block classification module is the main innovation
of this paper. It improves the model performance signifi-
cantly. The model with the block classification module can
obtain larger model capacity with fewer training samples, at
the expense of a little descent of localization precision, so as
to effectively improve detection accuracy and recall rate.
2 Methodology And Design
2.1 System Overview
In this work, surface defect detection is regarded as a
block-wise task. The architecture of the proposed approach
includes five components: i) feature extraction network; i-
i) adaptive average pooling layer; iii)manual weight module;
iv) multi-head attention module; v) block classification mod-
ule.
In this work, surface defect detection is regarded as a
block-wise task. The architecture of the proposed approach
includes five components: i) feature extract network; ii)
adaptive average pooling module; iii) manual weight mod-
ule; iv) multi-head attention module; v) block classification
module.

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 Fig. 3: Defect detection results of corrugated fuel tubes
1) First, input a batch size of raw images and correspond-
ing ground truth to the network, and extract the features
through the feature extraction network. A series of convo-
lution and pooling operations will be applied to each sample
image, and the model learns the effective features through
forward propagation. During the forward propagation, the
output feature maps combined with the ground truth are used
to calculate the loss. Then the back propagation algorithm
makes the loss descend so as to optimize the model.
2) Next, these feature maps will be resized into a fixed s-
cale through the adaptive average pooling layer, which helps
to reduce the number of model parameters, speed up the sub-
sequent inference process and reduce the risk of over-fitting.
3) Then, the feature maps will be secondary processed
with the manual weight module and the multi-head attention
module.
4) Finally, feed these feature maps into the block classifi-
cation module to conduct the final prediction on the blocks.
The output will be a binary matrix with a small scale corre-
sponding to the existence of defects in each block.
2.2 Feature Extraction Module
We adopt VGG16[[6]] network as our feature extraction
network, which is of small structure and has outstanding fea-
ture extraction ability as well as fast inference speed. The
module is pretrained with ImageNet[[7]] dataset and fine-
tuned with our own dataset.There are 13 convolution layers
included by this module in total. Each convolution layer is
followed by a batch layer and an activation layer. All these
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layers are optimized by stochastic gradient descent during
back propagation.
2.3 Adaptive Average Pooling Layer
The main purpose of this layer is to compress the feature
maps obtained by the feature extraction module. The size of
the feature maps will be fixed and matched with the num-
ber of image blocks that is set at the beginning. Meanwhile,
benefiting from this pooling operation, the number of pa-
rameters is reduced, which speed up the subsequent process
of inference. It can also help preventing the risk of over-
fitting, which appears important while considering the fact
that datasets related to the task of defect detection are usual-
ly much smaller than other tasks.
2.4 Manual Weight Module
The manual weight module can be regarded as a way of
deep supervision. We take statistics on the center positions
of defects in each image, and decide to set a weight that fol-
lows Gaussian distribution to make the model more sensitive
to those positions with frequent defects, in order to reduce
the rate of missing detection.
2.5 Block Classification Module
Traditional semantic segmentation algorithms detect tar-
gets by classifying pixel by pixel, which is inflexible. Al-
though it is potential to obtain sharp edges of defects, the
pixel-wise style causes lots of calculating resources waste
and model redundancy. Since the urge for a sharp localiza-
tion edge is not so strong when comparing with the detec-
 Fig. 4: Defect detection results on MT defect dataset

tion accuracy, it is surely more economic to set the detection Table 1: Performance on different datasets
granularity larger than a pixel. Another significant benefit Dataset mIOU(%) recall rate(%)
is that the model capacity corresponding to detection can be defect of corrugated fuel tubes 73.1 78.8
larger even though the amount of samples does not increase. MT defect dataset 82.6 88.2
We divide the raw images into N×N blocks, and process
the raw labels into a matrix with the corresponding scale of
N×N. In this way, we can treat each block as a single pixel
while utilizing the semantic segmentation algorithm. 3.2 Data Augmentation
The defect detection datasets are usually small due to the
high cost of manual label making and the rarity of defec-
t images. However, deep learning-based methods require a
3 Experimental Results great amount of labeled samples. The basic and most com-
mon method to solve the over-fitting issue caused by the lack
3.1 Datasets of dataset is data augmentation. We flip the images (up and
down / left and right) to make the datasets increase to 4 times
Datasets Description: In this work, we use two different
than the original.
datasets for experiments. The first is a small corrugated fuel
tube dataset labeled by ourselves. The second is a public 3.3 Evaluation Metrics
surface defect dataset called MT defect dataset. We apply mean intersection-over-union(mIOU) and recall
1) Corrugated Fuel Tube Dataset: The total number of rate as the main performance metrics. However, the mIOU
samples is no more than 150. It is divided in the ratio of we use is slightly different from the others. We calculate
8:1:1 into training set, validation set and test set. mIOU by block-level instead of pixel-level, since we apply
2) MT defect dataset: The magnetic-tile defect dataset is a larger detection granularity.
presented in [[8]] which contains 1344 defect images with
corresponding pixel-level labels. It includes five different 3.4 Experiment Results and Analysis
types of defects: uneven, fray, crack, blowhole, and break. The output of our model is in the form of a matrix of N ×
The resolutions of all the images are different. There are a N . To make it more visible, we transform it into the form of
series of severe noise contained in the images, which makes a bounding box.
a big challenge for detection. We also divide them in the 1) Detection results on Corrugated Fuel Tube Dataset: the
ratio of 8:1:1 under each type, respectively. mIOU is 73.1%, the recall rate is 78.8%, as shown in Table 1.

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The visual results are shown in Fig 3. It can be seen that
the model is capable to recognize the small defects. The
shortcoming is also obvious that the detection box is much
bigger than the area that the defect occupies.
2) Detection results on MT defect dataset: the mIOU is
82.6%, the recall rate is 88.2%, as shown in Table 1. The
visual results are shown in Fig 4. It can be seen that the
background of each image is full of all kinds of noises. The
model successfully predicts the correct positions of defects
even under such complex background. However, the disad-
vantage is that the model can not effectively obtain the edges
of defects.
4 Conclusion
In this work, a defect detection network for surface de-
fect detection for the inner surface of corrugated fuel tubes
is proposed. The architecture of the proposed approach in-
cludes feature extract network,adaptive average pooling lay-
er, manual weight module, multi-head attention module and
block classification module. To address the issue of over-
fitting caused by the lack of samples, we change the detec-
tion granularity from pixel-level to block-level, which is d-
ifferent from traditional semantic segmentation algorithms.
We carry out our experiments on our self-made corrugated
fuel tubes defect dataset and a public MT defect dataset. The
results are acceptable for the real detection process.
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