A Robust Fabric Defect Detection Method Based on Improved RefineDet

This paper proposes a robust fabric defect detection method, based on the improved RefineDet. This is done using the strong object localization ability and good generalization of the object detection model. Firstly, the method uses RefineDet as the base model, inheriting the advantages of the two-stage and one-stage detectors and can efficiently and quickly detect defect objects. Secondly, we design an improved head structure based on the Full Convolutional Channel Attention (FCCA) block and the Bottom-up Path Augmentation Transfer Connection Block (BA-TCB), which can improve the defect localization accuracy of the method. Finally, the proposed method applies many general optimization methods, such as attention mechanism, DIoU-NMS, and cosine annealing scheduler, and verifies the effectiveness of these optimization methods in the fabric defect localization task. Experimental results show that the proposed method is suitable for the defect detection of fabric images with unpattern background, regular patterns, and irregular patterns.