Fabric defect detection based on transfer learning and improved Faster R-CNN

Fabric defect detection is an important quality inspection process in the textile industry. A fabric defect detection system based on transfer learning and an improved Faster R-CNN is proposed to solve the problems of low detection accuracy, general convergence ability, and poor detection effect for small target defects in existing fabric defect detection algorithms. The pre-trained weights on the big dataset Imagenet are first extracted for transfer learning. Images are then input into the improved Faster R-CNN network, while the ResNet50 and ROI Align are used to replace the original VGG16 feature extraction network structure and a region of interest (ROI) pooling layer to avoid the problems of region mismatch caused by two quantizations from ROI pooling. The region proposal network (RPN) is combined with the multi-scale feature pyramid FPN to generate candidate regions with richer semantic information and project them onto the feature map to obtain the corresponding feature matrix. Cascaded modules are integrated and different IoU thresholds are used for each level to distinguish positive and negative samples. Finally, the softmax classifier is adopted to identify the image and obtain the predictions. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy and convergence ability of the improved Faster R-CNN are greatly enhanced compared with the current mainstream models, which provides a reference for future fabric defect detection methods.