Micro Surface Defect Detection Method for Silicon Steel Strip Based on Saliency Convex Active Contour Model

Accurate detection of surface defect is an indispensable section in steel surface inspection system. In order to detect the micro surface defect of silicon steel strip, a new detection method based on saliency convex active contour model is proposed. In the proposed method, visual saliency extraction is employed to suppress the clutter background for the purpose of highlighting the potential objects. The extracted saliency map is then exploited as a feature, which is fused into a convex energy minimization function of local-based active contour. Meanwhile, a numerical minimization algorithm is introduced to separate the micro surface defects from cluttered background. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method presents good performance for detecting micro surface defects including spot-defect and steel-pit-defect. Even in the cluttered background, the proposed method detects almost all of the microdefects without any false objects.