An automated steel plates fault diagnosis system using adaptive faster region convolutional neural network

In today’s world, Steel plates play essential materials for various industries like the national defense industry, chemical industry, automobile industry, machinery manufacturing, etc. However, some defects may occur in a few plates during the manufacture of stainless-steel plates which directly impact the quality of the stainless-steel plate. If the faulted plate detection can be done manually, then it leads to errors and a time-consuming process. Hence, a computerized automated system is necessary to detect the abnormalities. In this paper, a novel Adaptive Faster Region Convolutional Neural Networks (AFRCNN) scheme has been proposed for automatic fault detection of stainless-steel plates. The proposed AFRCNN scheme comprises three phases: identification, detection, and recognition. Primarily, the damaged plates are identified using Region Proposal Network and Fully Convolutional Neural Network functioning as a combined process under AFRCNN. In the next phase, the number corresponding to the particular plate is recognized through the standard Automated Plate Number Recognition approach with the support of the character recognition technique. The simulation results manifest that the proposed AFRCNN scheme obtains a superior classification accuracy of 99.36%, specificity of 99.24%, and F1-score of 98.18% as compared with the existing state-of-the-art schemes.