Bag of tricks for fabric defect detection based on Cascade R-CNN

In this paper, a bag of tricks is proposed to improve the precision of fabric defect detection. Although the general state-of-the-art convolutional neural network detection algorithm can achieve a better detection effect, in fact, the detection precision still has enough room to improve on fabric defect detection. Therefore, we propose three tricks to further improve the precision. Firstly, we use multiscale training, which scales the single input image into a number of images of different resolutions for training, so as to be able to adapt to the box distribution of different scales. Secondly, we use the dimension clusters method. By observing the distribution of the width and the height of the defect size in the fabric dataset, we find that the distribution of the defect size in the dataset is extremely unbalanced and the size span is large. We believe that the training results of the default prior boxes setting might not be optimal, so we conduct dimensional clustering for the width and height of the defect size of the dataset, so as to make the network model easier to learn. Thirdly, we use soft non-maximum suppression instead of traditional non-maximum suppression to avoid the situation that the same kinds of defect category in the dataset are overlapped and eliminated as repeated detection. With this bag of tricks, we effectively improve the precision of fabric defect detection by 8.9% mAP on the basis of the baseline of state-of-the-art convolutional neural network detection algorithm.