Surface defect detection is a critical task in industrial production process. Nowadays, there are lots of detection methods based on computer vision and have been successfully applied in industry, they also achieved good results. However, achieving full automation of surface defect detection remains a challenge, due to the complexity of surface defect, in intra-class, while the defects between inter-class contain similar parts, there are large differences in appearance of the defects. To address these issues, this paper proposes a pyramid feature fusion and global context attention network for pixel-wise detection of surface defect, called PGA-Net. In the framework, the multi-scale features are extracted at first from backbone network. Then the pyramid feature fusion module is used to fuse these features into five resolutions through some efficient dense skip connections. Finally, the global context attention module is applied to the fusion feature maps of adjacent resolution, which allows effective information propagate from low-resolution fusion feature maps to high-resolution fusion ones. In addition, the boundary refinement block is added to the framework to refine the boundary of defect and improve the result of predict. The final prediction is the fusion of the five resolutions fusion feature maps. The results of evaluation on four real-world defect datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on mean Intersection of Union and mean Pixel Accuracy (NEU-Seg: 82.15%, DAGM 2007: 74.78%, MT_defect: 71.31%, Road_defect: 79.54%).

Surface defect segmentation of no-service rail is important for its quality assessment. There are several challenges of uneven illumination, complex background, and difficulty of sample collection for no-service rail surface defects (NRSDs). In this paper, we propose an acquisition scheme with two lamp light and color scan line CCD to alleviate uneven illumination. Then a multiple context information segmentation network is proposed to improve NRSD segmentation. The network makes full use of context information based on dense block, pyramid pooling module and multi-information integration. Besides, the attention mechanism is applied to optimize extracted information by filtering noise. For the problem of real sample shortage, we propose to utilize artificial samples to train network. And a NRSD dataset NRSD-MN is built with artificial NRSDs and natural NRSDs. Experiment results show that our method is feasible and has a good segmentation effect on artificial and natural NRSDs.

Surface defect inspection based on deep learning has demonstrated outstanding performance in improving detection accuracy and model generalization. However, the small scale of defect datasets always limits the application of deep models in industry. Generative models can obtain realistic samples in a very cheap way, which can effectively solve this problem and thus has received widespread attention in recent years. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and summary of the current studies of surface defect inspection methods proposed between 2022 and 2024. First, according to the use of generative models, these methods are classified into four categories: Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and multi-models. Second, the research status of surface defect inspection based on generative models in recent years is discussed from four aspects: sample generation, detection objective, inspection task, and learning model. Then, the public datasets and evaluation metrics that are commonly used for surface defect inspection are discussed, and a comparative evaluation of defect inspection methods based on generative models is provided. Finally, this study discusses the existing challenges for the defect inspection methods based on generative models, providing insights for future research.