Image Sample Generation of Stator Surface Defects Based on Layer Mask Blending Generative Adversarial Network

In industrial production processes, defect inspection plays an important role in reducing the occurrence of failures and improving production efficiency. Data-driven algorithms represented by deep learning have made great progress in recent years, but need to face the problems of small quantity and poor quality of datasets when applied to industrial defect inspection. This paper proposes a layer mask blending-based generative adversarial network (LMBGAN) and optimizes the training process to generate high-quality surface defect samples. LMBGAN generates defect images and layer masks using the defect image decoder and layer mask decoder with the Pixel Shuffle operation. Inspired by the layer mask in computer painting, LMBGAN adopts the input image as the base layer and blends the defect foreground through the layer mask, giving it the ability to focus more on generating upper-layer defect images and reducing unnecessary background changes. LMBGAN additionally introduces adaptive discriminator augmentation and non-saturating logistic loss to promote model convergence under small datasets, effectively alleviating the problem of GAN training difficulties with limited data. The experiment results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality and diverse defect image samples through easily accessible normal samples, thus reducing the difficulty of obtaining rare defect image samples.