Progressively Learning Dynamic Level Set for Weakly Supervised Industrial Defect Segmentation

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Abstract
With continuous advancements in sensor technology and computer vision, automated surface defect detection has become an important problem in the modern manufacturing industry. Although deep-learning-based defect detection methods have proven successful in various inspection tasks, they often require extensive high-quality pixel-level annotations for model training. Industrial defects, characterized by diverse shapes and intricate textures, require manual labelling by skilled inspectors. This study introduces a weakly supervised defect segmentation framework called the progressively learning dynamic level set (PLDL) to overcome these constraints. This framework incorporates two parallel learning modules and a differentiable level set module interconnected through a progressive learning strategy facilitated by an innovative loss function. Using only image-level labels as inputs, the PLDL framework iteratively refines object boundaries, dynamically optimizes the training process, and generates pixel-level outputs. Our method is efficient and consistent, requiring no manual supervision or post-processing steps. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets representing diverse industrial scenarios reveal that PLDL outperforms recent weakly supervised models. It achieved 76.52%, 85.23%, 85.71%, 84.43%, and 83.17% in mIoU, mPA, Precision, Recall, and F-measure, respectively, indicating its superior effectiveness in weakly supervised defect segmentation.
Funding Information
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFB1704500)
  • State Ministry of Science and Technology Innovation Fund of China (2018IM030200)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1708255)

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