V-DAFT: visual technique for texture image defect recognition with denoising autoencoder and fourier transform

Abstract

Texture is the surface qualities and visual attributes of an object, determined by the arrangement, size, shape, density, and proportion of its fundamental components. In the manufacturing industry, products typically have uniform textures, allowing for automated visual inspections of the product surface to recognize defects. During this process, texture defect recognition techniques can be employed. In this paper, we propose a method that combines a convolutional autoencoder architecture with Fourier transform analysis. We employ a normal reconstructed template as defined in this study. Despite its simple structure and rapid training and inference capabilities, it offers recognition performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Fourier transform is a powerful tool for analyzing the frequency domain of images and signals, which is essential for effective defect recognition as texture defects often exhibit characteristic changes in specific frequency ranges. The experiment evaluates the recognition performance using the AUC metric, with the proposed method showing a score of 93.7%. To compare with existing approaches, we present experimental results from previous research, an ablation study of the proposed method, and results based on the high-pass filter used in the Fourier mask.