Toward Automated Fabric Defect Detection: A Survey of Recent Computer Vision Approaches

Defect detection is a crucial part of the pipeline in many industries. In the textile industry, it is especially important, as it will affect the quality and price of the final product. However, it is mostly performed by human agents, who have been reported to have poor performance, along with requiring a costly and time-consuming training process. As such, methods to automate the process have been increasingly explored throughout the last 20 years. While there are many traditional approaches to this problem, with the advent of deep learning, machine learning-based approaches now constitute the majority of all possible approaches. Other articles have explored traditional approaches and machine learning approaches in a more general way, detailing their evolution over time. In this review, we summarize the most important advancements in the last 5 years and focus mostly on machine learning-based approaches. We also outline the most promising avenues of research in the future.