An End‐to‐End Steel Strip Surface Defects Recognition System Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Steel strip surface defects recognition is very important to steel strip production and quality control, which needs further improvement. In this paper, an end‐to‐end surface defects recognition system is proposed for steel strip surface inspection. This system is based on the symmetric surround saliency map for surface defects detection and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which directly use the defect image as input and defect category as output for seven classes of steel strip defects classification. The CNNs are trained purely on raw defect images and learned defect features from the training of network, which avoiding the separation between feature extraction and image classification, so that forms an end‐to‐end defects recognition pipeline. To further illustrate the superiority of the defect recognition methods with CNNs, an authoritative and standard steel strip surface defect dataset − NEU is also used to evaluate the defect recognition effect using CNNs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods perform well in steel strip surface defect detection of different types and achieve a high recognition rate for defect images. In addition, a series of data augmentation methods are discussed to analyze its effect on avoiding over‐fitting for defects recognition.