Identification method for micro–nano defects in Si3N4 ceramic bearing rollers

In response to the surface micro–nano defects of small Si3N4 ceramic bearing rollers during use, as well as the poor generalization ability and low accuracy of the object detection model trained on the micro and nano defect dataset, an enhanced recognition algorithm based on deep convolutional generative adversarial networks is proposed. Due to the limited size of the dataset, the DCGAN model is reconstructed to effectively expand the micro–nano defect dataset. In addition, noise generalization is applied to stabilize DCGAN model training, creating a low-dimensional manifold distribution to ensure significant overlap between the data and the original dataset, and activating Jensen–Shannon (JS) divergence for stable training. To verify the effectiveness of the enhanced dataset, synthetic micro–nano defects are used to improve the YOLO-v4-tiny object detection model. By comparing t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and feature vectors, it can be found that the images generated by the optimized DCGAN have higher grayscale feature diversity and better visual consistency. After generations of enhancements, the micro–nano defect detection speed has reached 226FPS, and the accuracy has reached 97.41%.