Steel Surface Defect Diagnostics Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Class Activation Map

Steel defect diagnostics is considerably important for a steel-manufacturing industry as it is strongly related to the product quality and production efficiency. Product quality control suffers from a real-time diagnostic capability since it is less-automatic and is not reliable in detecting steel surface defects. In this study, we propose a relatively new approach for diagnosing steel defects using a deep structured neural network, e.g., convolutional neural network (CNN) with class activation maps. Rather than using a simple deep learning algorithm for the classification task, we extend the CNN diagnostic model for being used to analyze the localized defect regions within the images to support a real-time visual decision-making process. Based on the experimental results, the proposed approach achieves a near-perfect detection performance at 99.44% and 0.99 concerning the accuracy and F-1 score metric, respectively. The results are better than other shallow machine learning algorithms, i.e., support vector machine and logistic regression under the same validation technique.