Synthetic Data Augmentation Using GAN For Improved Automated Visual Inspection

Quality control is a crucial activity manufacturing companies perform to ensure their products conform to the requirements and specifications. The introduction of artificial intelligence models enables to automate the visual quality inspection, speeding up the inspection process and ensuring all products are evaluated under the same criteria. In this research, we compare supervised and unsupervised defect detection techniques and explore data augmentation techniques to mitigate the data imbalance in the context of automated visual inspection. Furthermore, we use Generative Adversarial Networks for data augmentation to enhance the classifiers’ discriminative performance. Our results show that state-of-the-art unsupervised defect detection does not match the performance of supervised models but can reduce the labeling workload if tolerating some labeling errors. Furthermore, the best classification performance was achieved considering GAN-based data generation with AUC ROC scores equal to or higher than 0,9898. We performed the research with real-world data provided by Philips Consumer Lifestyle BV.