A final optics assembly (FOA) is located at the output end of an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experimental device. There are 48 FOAs in the Shenguang-III (SG-III) laser facility, each containing nine large aperture optics, the aperture size of which is . Laser-induced damage is easily generated under 351-nm high-power laser irradiation.1 2. – 3 When the number of damaged sites increases to a certain magnitude, these sites modulate the high-power UV lasers in ICF experiments, thereby significantly affecting the beam quality.4 5. 6. – 7 The best way to rapidly and efficiently detect and track the damage on an FOA surface is to design an online imaging system for observing tiny defects in the center of the target chamber. From the literature published in recent years, there are mainly two research teams in the field of damage online detection in ICF experiments for large aperture optics: the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP). Each team has developed its own experimental version of the final optics damage inspection (FODI) system, namely, the NIF FODI developed for the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF) by LLNL scientists8,9 and the SG-III FODI we developed for the SG-III laser facility at the CAEP.10 In general, FODI is an online imaging system based on machine vision for rapidly observing laser-induced damage. With edge illumination technology in the dark field, FODI captures images of the damage on an FOA surface and obtains the damage information by image processing. LLNL scientists have conducted much meaningful research in this field. Kegelmeyer et al.11 used the local area signal-to-noise ratio (LASNR) algorithm to process FODI images to obtain all possible damage sites; these sites are also called candidate sites or LASNR markers. The FOA damage condition can be roughly obtained using these LASNR markers. However, due to the presence of stray light, a significant amount of noise is present in FODI images in addition to true damage, as shown in Fig. 1(b), which is referred to as false damage.6,12,13 These candidate sites can generally be divided into these categories: damage site, hardware reflection (HR), damaged CCD pixels (DC), reflection of a damage site (RD), and attachments (Att).14 Damage sites are also called true damage sites or true sites, and the others are called false damage sites or false sites. How to accurately remove all kinds of false damage while retaining the true damage is a hot and challenging topic in the present research. Abdulla et al. conducted machine learning of an ensemble of decision trees to identify HR-type false sites from LASNR markers with very high accuracy (99.8%, 10-fold crossvalidation). After the removal of HR-type sites, the remaining false sites (Abdulla et al.15 referred to them as being of the unknown type, here abbreviated as UN-type) and true sites were mixed together. DC-type false sites are caused by radiation or thermal noise generated by long-term operation in a vacuum environment and generally appear as randomly distributed isolated pixels with high gray values. These DC can be easily identified via machine learning or other pattern recognition methods. To save time for later machine learning classifications, we have identified these pixels in the data-preprocessing step and removed them from the FODI image. RD-type false sites are also easy to identify and will be discussed in Sec. 2.1. Att-type false sites are more similar to true sites than any other types of false site when observed by the naked eye. The traditional machine learning methods often struggle to identify them, and almost no related studies exist in the field of damage online inspection. To solve this problem, we establish our FODI detection system in the SG-III laser facility and present a new solution for the classification of true and false sites. Limited by the size of the workspace, the SG-III FODI system is smaller than the NIF FODI system, as shown in Fig. 1(a); its size is 0.35 m. The SG-III FODI system obtains online images in a vacuum target chamber, in which the distance between the FOA and FODI camera usually ranges from 3.7 to 5.1 m. This system can detect damage larger than with a sizing accuracy of at most and damage ranging from 50 to with a sizing accuracy of at most . For convenience of description, FODI is herein used to refer to SG-III FODI unless specified as NIF FODI.