A Feature Memory Rearrangement Network for Visual Inspection of Textured Surface Defects Toward Edge Intelligent Manufacturing

Recent advances in the industrial inspection of textured surfaces-in the form of visual inspection-have made such inspections possible for efficient, flexible manufacturing systems. We propose an unsupervised feature memory rearrangement network (FMR-Net) to accurately detect various textural defects simultaneously. Consistent with mainstream methods, we adopt the idea of background reconstruction; however, we innovatively utilize artificial synthetic defects to enable the model to recognize anomalies, while traditional wisdom relies only on defect-free samples. First, we employ an encoding module to obtain multiscale features of the textured surface. Subsequently, a contrastive-learning-based memory feature module (CMFM) is proposed to obtain discriminative representations and construct a normal feature memory bank in the latent space, which can be employed as a substitute for defects and fast anomaly scores at the patch level. Next, a novel global feature rearrangement module (GFRM) is proposed to further suppress the reconstruction of residual defects. Finally, a decoding module utilizes the restored features to reconstruct the normal texture background. In addition, to improve inspection performance, a two-phase training strategy is utilized for accurate defect restoration refinement, and we exploit a multimodal inspection method to achieve noise-robust defect localization. We verify our method through extensive experiments and test its practical deployment in collaborative edge--cloud intelligent manufacturing scenarios by means of a multilevel detection method, demonstrating that FMR-Net exhibits state-of-the-art inspection accuracy and shows great potential for use in edge-computing-enabled smart industries.

Automated summary

Recent advances in industrial inspection of textured surfaces have made efficient and flexible manufacturing systems possible. This paper proposes an unsupervised feature memory rearrangement network (FMR-Net) that accurately detects various textural defects simultaneously. The network utilizes background reconstruction and artificial synthetic defects to recognize anomalies, achieving state-of-the-art inspection accuracy and showing great potential for use in smart industries.