A supervised approach for automated surface defect detection in ceramic tile quality control

Surface defect detection is very important to guarantee the quality of ceramic tiles production. At present, this process is usually performed manually in the ceramic tile industry, which is low efficiency and time-consuming. For small surface defects detection of high-resolution ceramic tiles image, an intelligent detection method for surface defects of ceramic tiles based on an improved you only look once version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm is presented. Firstly, the high-resolution ceramic tile images are cropped into slices, and the Bottleneck module in the YOLOv5s network is optimized by introducing depthwise convolution and replaced in the whole network. Then, feature extraction is performed using the improved Shufflenetv2 backbone, and an attention mechanism is added to the backbone network to improve the feature extraction ability. The path aggregation network (PAN) and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) neck are used to enhance the feature extraction, and finally, the YOLO head is used to identify and locate the ceramic tile defects. The multiple sliding windows detection method is proposed to detect the original ceramic tile image which is faster than the single sliding window detection method. The experimental results show that compared with the original YOLOv5s detection algorithm, the parameters of the model are reduced by 20.46 %, the floating point operations are reduced by 26.22 %, and the mean average precision (mAP) of the proposed method is 96.73 % in the ceramic tile image slice test set which has 1.93 % improvement in mAP than the original YOLOv5s. Compare with other object detection methods, the method proposed in this paper also has certain advantages. In the high-resolution ceramic tile images test set, the mAP of the proposed algorithm is 86.44 % by using the multiple sliding window detection method. The ceramic defect detection experiment has verified the feasibility of the method proposed in this paper.