Abstract
Fabric defect detection plays an increasingly important role in the
industrial automation application for fabric production, but how to detect
defects rapidly and accurately is still challenging. In this study, we
propose a powerful fabric defect detection method using a hybrid of
convolutional neural network (CNN) and variational autoencoder (VAE). The
convolutional layers are used for extracting fabric image pattern features
and the variational autoencoder is used for modeling the latent
characteristics and inferring a reconstruction. The defect positions can be
detected by the differences between the original image and the
reconstruction image. The proposed method is validated on public patterned
fabric datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed
model can achieve outstanding performance in both image level and pixel
level defect detection.