Multi-Period Texture Contrast Enhancement for Low-Contrast Wafer Defect Detection and Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces TexWDS, a texture-aware framework that enhances low-contrast wafer defect detection by combining multi-scale feature retention with frequency-domain texture modeling, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-period texture contrast enhancement module and multi-scale strategies to improve defect detection in complex textured backgrounds.

Findings

Achieves 8.3% higher mAP50-95 than baseline

Reduces false positive rate by 8.6%

Effectively disentangles defects from periodic textures

Abstract

Wafer defect segmentation is pivotal for semiconductor yield optimization yet remains challenged by the intrinsic conflict between microscale anomalies and highly periodic, overwhelming background textures. Existing deep learning paradigms often falter due to feature dilution during downsampling and the lack of explicit mechanisms to disentangle low-contrast defects from process-induced noise. To transcend these limitations, we propose TexWDS, a texture-aware framework that harmonizes multi-scale feature retention with frequency-domain perturbation modeling. Our methodology incorporates three strategic innovations: (1) A Multi-scale Receptive Field Reweighting strategy is introduced to mitigate aliasing effects and preserve high-frequency details of micro-defects often lost in standard pyramidal architectures. (2) The Multi-scale Unified Semantic Enhancer (MUSE) integrates local appearance with global context encoding, effectively enhancing feature discriminability in low-visibility regions. (3) Crucially, we design a plug-and-play Multi-Periodic Texture Contrast Enhancement (MPTCE) module. By modeling texture disruptions in the frequency domain, MPTCE explicitly decouples non-periodic anomalies from structured backgrounds, boosting contrast for camouflaged defects. Extensive experiments on real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that TexWDS achieves a new state-of-the-art, surpassing the baseline by 8.3% in mAP50-95 and 7.7% in recall, while reducing the false positive rate by approximately 8.6%. These results underscore the framework's robustness in handling complex periodic patterns and its suitability for high-precision manufacturing inspection.