Fabric defect recognition using optimized neural networks

Fabric defect recognition is an important measure for quality control in a textile factory. This article utilizes a deep convolutional neural network to recognize defects in fabrics that have complicated textures. Although convolutional neural networks are very powerful, a large number of parameters consume considerable computation time and memory bandwidth. In real-world applications, however, the fabric defect recognition task needs to be carried out in a timely fashion on a computation-limited platform. To optimize a deep convolutional neural network, a novel method is introduced to reveal the input pattern that originally caused a specific activation in the network feature maps. Using this visualization technique, this study visualizes the features in a fully trained convolutional model and attempts to change the architecture of original neural network to reduce computational load. After a series of improvements, a new convolutional network is acquired that is more efficient to the fabric image feature extraction, and the computation load and the total number of parameters in the new network is 23% and 8.9%, respectively, of the original model. The proposed neural network is specifically tailored for fabric defect recognition in resource-constrained environments. All of the source code and pretrained models are available online at https://github.com/ZCmeteor .