Enhancing Precision with an Ensemble Generative Adversarial Network for Steel Surface Defect Detectors (EnsGAN-SDD)

Defects are the primary problem affecting steel product quality in the steel industry. The specific challenges in developing detect defectors involve the vagueness and tiny size of defects. To solve these problems, we propose incorporating super-resolution technique, sequential feature pyramid network, and boundary localization. Initially, the ensemble of enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial networks (ESRGAN) was proposed for the preprocessing stage to generate a more detailed contour of the original steel image. Next, in the detector section, the latest state-of-the-art feature pyramid network, known as De-tectoRS, utilized the recursive feature pyramid network technique to extract deeper multi-scale steel features by learning the feedback from the sequential feature pyramid network. Finally, Side-Aware Boundary Localization was used to precisely generate the output prediction of the defect detectors. We named our approach EnsGAN-SDD. Extensive experimental studies showed that the proposed methods improved the defect detector’s performance, which also surpassed the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed EnsGAN achieved better performance and effectiveness in processing time compared with the original ESRGAN. We believe our innovation could significantly contribute to improved production quality in the steel industry.