PreCaCycleGAN: Perceptual Capsule Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network for Industrial Defective Sample Augmentation

Machine vision is essential for intelligent industrial manufacturing driven by Industry 4.0, especially for surface defect detection of industrial products. However, this domain is facing sparse and imbalanced defect data and poor model generalization, affecting industrial efficiency and quality. We propose a perceptual capsule cycle generative adversarial network (PreCaCycleGAN) for industrial defect sample augmentation, generating realistic and diverse defect samples from defect-free real samples. PreCaCycleGAN enhances CycleGAN with a U-Net and DenseNet-based generator to improve defect feature propagation and reuse and adds a perceptual loss function and a capsule network to improve authenticity and semantic information of generated features, enabling richer and more realistic global and detailed features of defect samples. We experiment on ten datasets, splitting each dataset into training and testing sets to evaluate model generalization across datasets. We train three defect detection models (YOLOv5, SSD, and Faster-RCNN) with original data and augmented data from PreCaCycleGAN and other state-of-the-art methods, such as CycleGAN-TSS and Tree-CycleGAN, and validate them on different datasets. Results show that PreCaCycleGAN improves detection accuracy and rate and reduces the false detection rate of detection models compared to other methods on different datasets, demonstrating its robustness and generalization under various defect conditions.