CANet: Contextual Information and Spatial Attention Based Network for Detecting Small Defects in Manufacturing Industry

Despite the promising development of Automatic Visual Inspection (AVI) in the manufacturing industry, detecting small-sized defects with fewer pixels coverage remains a challenging problem due to its insufficient attention and lack of semantic information. Most exsiting convolutional inspection methods overlook the long-range dependence of context and lack adaptive fusion strategies to exploit heterogeneous features. To address these issues in AVI, this paper proposes a novel contextual information and spatial attention based network (CANet), which consists of two steps, namely CAblock and LaplacianFPN, for effective perception and exploitation of small defect features. Specifically, CAblock extracts semantic information with rich context by encoding spatial long-range dependence and decoding contextual information as channel-specific bias through a Spatial Attention Encoder (SAE) and a Context Block Decoder (CBD), respectively. LaplacianFPN further performs adaptive feature fusion considering both feature consistency and heterogeneity via two parallel branches. As a benchmark, a self-built Engine Surface Defects (ESD) dataset collected in real industry containing 89.70% small defects is constructed. Experimental results show that CANet achieves mAP-50 improvements of 1.5% and 4.3% compared to state-of-the-art methods on NEU-DET and ESD, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is now available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/CANet.