Fabric Defect Detection in Real World Manufacturing Using Deep Learning

Defect detection is very important for guaranteeing the quality and pricing of fabric. A considerable amount of fabric is discarded as waste because of defects, leading to substantial annual losses. While manual inspection has traditionally been the norm for detection, adopting an automatic defect detection scheme based on a deep learning model offers a timely and efficient solution for assessing fabric quality. In real-time manufacturing scenarios, datasets lack high-quality, precisely positioned images. Moreover, both plain and printed fabrics are being manufactured in industries simultaneously; therefore, a single model should be capable of detecting defects in all kinds of fabric. So training a robust deep learning model that detects defects in fabric datasets generated during production with high accuracy and lower computational costs is required. This study uses an indigenous dataset directly sourced from Chenab Textiles, providing authentic and diverse images representative of actual manufacturing conditions. The dataset is used to train a computationally faster but lighter state-of-the-art network, i.e., YOLOv8. For comparison, YOLOv5 and MobileNetV2-SSD FPN-Lite models are also trained on the same dataset. YOLOv8n achieved the highest performance, with a mAP of 84.8%, precision of 0.818, and recall of 0.839 across seven different defect classes.