Region-Aware CAM: High-Resolution Weakly-Supervised Defect Segmentation via Salient Region Perception

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weakly supervised defect segmentation method that combines region-aware CAM, filtering-guided backpropagation, and pseudo-label training to improve defect detection accuracy in industrial settings.

Contribution

It proposes a novel region-aware CAM framework with filtering-guided backpropagation and pseudo-label training to enhance defect segmentation under weak supervision.

Findings

Outperforms existing weakly supervised methods on industrial defect datasets.

Effectively refines defect regions with high spatial precision.

Bridges the gap between weak supervision and high-accuracy defect segmentation.

Abstract

Surface defect detection plays a critical role in industrial quality inspection. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced the automation level of detection processes. However, conventional semantic segmentation and object detection models heavily rely on large-scale annotated datasets, which conflicts with the practical requirements of defect detection tasks. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised semantic segmentation framework comprising two key components: a region-aware class activation map (CAM) and pseudo-label training. To address the limitations of existing CAM methods, especially low-resolution thermal maps, and insufficient detail preservation, we introduce filtering-guided backpropagation (FGBP), which refines target regions by filtering gradient magnitudes to identify areas with higher relevance to defects. Building upon this, we further develop a region-aware weighted module to enhance spatial precision. Finally, pseudo-label segmentation is implemented to refine the model's performance iteratively. Comprehensive experiments on industrial defect datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The proposed framework effectively bridges the gap between weakly supervised learning and high-precision defect segmentation, offering a practical solution for resource-constrained industrial scenarios.