With the development of science and technology and the progress of the times, automation and intelligence have been popularized in manufacturing in all walks of life. With the progress of productivity, product defect detection has become an indispensable part. However, in practical scenarios, the application of supervised deep learning algorithms in the field of defect detection is limited due to the difficulty and unpredictability of obtaining defect samples. In recent years, semi-supervised and unsupervised deep learning algorithms have attracted more and more attention in various defect detection tasks. Generative adversarial networks (GAN), as an unsupervised learning algorithm, has been widely used in defect detection tasks in various fields due to its powerful generation ability. In order to provide some inspiration for the researchers who intend to use GAN for defect detection research. In this paper, the theoretical basis, technical development and practical application of GAN based defect detection are reviewed. This paper also discusses the current outstanding problems of GAN and GAN-based defect detection, and makes a detailed prediction and analysis of the possible future research directions. This paper summarizes the relevant literature on the research progress and application status of GAN based defect detection, which provides certain technical information for researchers who are interested in researching GAN and hope to apply it to defect detection tasks.

The surface defect detection of industrial products has become a crucial link in industrial manufacturing. It has a series of chain effects on the control of product quality, the safety of the subsequent use of products, the reputation of products, and production efficiency. However, in actual production, it is often difficult to collect defect image samples. Without a sufficient number of defect image samples, training defect detection models is difficult to achieve. In this paper, a defect image generation method DG-GAN is proposed for defect detection. Based on the idea of the progressive generative adversarial, $D2$ adversarial loss function, cyclic consistency loss function, a data augmentation module, and a self-attention mechanism are introduced to improve the training stability and generative ability of the network. The DG-GAN method can generate high-quality and high-diversity surface defect images. The surface defect image generated by the model can be used to train the defect detection model and improve the convergence stability and detection accuracy of the defect detection model. Validation was performed on two data sets. Compared to the previous methods, the FID score of the generated defect images was significantly reduced (mean reductions of 16.17 and 20.06, respectively). The YOLOX detection accuracy was significantly improved with the increase in generated defect images (the highest increases were 6.1% and 20.4%, respectively). Experimental results showed that the DG-GAN model is effective in surface defect detection tasks.

In the field of industry, defect detection based on YOLO models is widely used. In real detection, the method of defect detection of insulative baffles is artificial detection. The work efficiency of this method, however, is low because the detection is depends absolutely on human eyes. Considering the excellent performance of YOLOx, an intelligent detection method based on YOLOx is proposed. First, we selected a CIOU loss function instead of an IOU loss function by analyzing the defect characteristics of insulative baffles. In addition, considering the limitation of model resources in application scenarios, the lightweight YOLOx model is proposed. We replaced YOLOx’s backbone with lightweight backbones (MobileNetV3 and GhostNet), and used Depthwise separable convolution instead of conventional convolution. This operation reduces the number of network parameters by about 42% compared with the original YOLOx network. However, the mAP of it is decreased by about 0.8% compared with the original YOLOx model. Finally, the attention mechanism is introduced into the feature fusion module to solve this problem, and we called the lightweight YOLOx with an attention module LA_YOLOx. The final value of mAP of LA_YOLOx reaches 95.60%, while the original YOLOx model is 95.31%, which proves the effectiveness of the LA_YOLOx model.