Domain Transfer for Surface Defect Detection using Few-Shot Learning on Scarce Data

This study evaluates the effectiveness of transfer learning models in industrial surface defect detection using few-shot learning. Surface defect detection is a critical task in various industrial applications, where accurately detecting and classifying defects can improve product quality and increase manufacturing efficiency. However, data scarcity is a considerable challenge: obtaining and labelling defect samples is a costly, time-consuming process and difficult due to their infrequent occurrence. Few-Shot learning aims to effectively train models using only a limited number of labelled samples, thus mitigating the impact of data scarcity. This study compares the performance of transfer learning models pre-trained on three different data sets for few-shot learning in the context of surface defect detection. On the one hand, transfer learning models pre-trained on the ImageNet data set yield the best overall results in terms of accuracy. On the other hand, our results indicate that the DAGM data set, an industrial optical inspection data set which is close to the target domain, is particularly effective for training models to clearly detect surface defects in a few-shot learning scenario.