Learn to Differ: Sim2Real Small Defection Segmentation Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces SSDS, a novel deep learning network trained solely on simulated data to detect small defections across varying contexts, overcoming the limitations of fixed-context models in real-world applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes SSDS, a context-agnostic small defection segmentation network trained with simulation, enabling robust real-world defect detection without retraining for each new setting.

Findings

SSDS trained on simulated data effectively detects real-world small defections.

The network generalizes across different contexts and environments.

Validation shows SSDS outperforms traditional methods in defect detection accuracy.

Abstract

Recent studies on deep-learning-based small defection segmentation approaches are trained in specific settings and tend to be limited by fixed context. Throughout the training, the network inevitably learns the representation of the background of the training data before figuring out the defection. They underperform in the inference stage once the context changed and can only be solved by training in every new setting. This eventually leads to the limitation in practical robotic applications where contexts keep varying. To cope with this, instead of training a network context by context and hoping it to generalize, why not stop misleading it with any limited context and start training it with pure simulation? In this paper, we propose the network SSDS that learns a way of distinguishing small defections between two images regardless of the context, so that the network can be trained once for all. A small defection detection layer utilizing the pose sensitivity of phase correlation between images is introduced and is followed by an outlier masking layer. The network is trained on randomly generated simulated data with simple shapes and is generalized across the real world. Finally, SSDS is validated on real-world collected data and demonstrates the ability that even when trained in cheap simulation, SSDS can still find small defections in the real world showing the effectiveness and its potential for practical applications.