Transferring Indoor Corrosion Image Assessment Models to Outdoor Images via Domain Adaptation

Corrosion of materials impacts critical economic sectors from infrastructure, transportation, defense, health, to the environment. The development of safe anti-corrosive materials is thus an important area of study in materials science. Corrosion science of preparing materials and then monitoring their corrosion under adverse conditions is labor intensive, time consuming, and extremely costly. While deep learning has become popular in automating various engineering tasks, the development of deep models for corrosion assessment is lacking. We are the first to study deep domain adaptation (DA) models for the automated assessment of the corrosion status of anti-corrosive materials. Corrosion data, i.e., photographic images of treated corroding materials, is abundant when produced in artificially controlled laboratory settings, while corrosion image data sets from rich natural outdoor environments are more challenging to produce and thus much smaller. We leverage the more readily available indoor corrosion data to train a classifier and then transfer it via deep domain adaptation to also perform well on the small yet more realistic outdoor corrosion image data set – without requiring target labels. We empirically compare 5 popular domain adaptation models on real-world corrosion image data sets. Our study finds that DA achieves 27% improvement in test accuracy compared to the performance of the no-DA baseline for classifying real-world outdoor corrosion data.