EfficientDet for fabric defect detection based on edge computing

Abstract

The productivity of textile industry is positively correlated with the efficiency of fabric defect detection. Traditional manual detection methods have gradually been replaced by deep learning algorithms based on cloud computing due to the low accuracy and high cost of manual methods. Nonetheless, these cloud computing-based methods are still suboptimal due to the data transmission latency between the end devices and the cloud. To facilitate defect detection with more efficiency, a low-latency, low power consumption, easy upgrade, and automatical visual inspection system with the help of edge computing are proposed in this work. Firstly, the method uses EfficientDet-D0 as the detection algorithm, integrating the advantages of lightweight and scalable and can suit the resource-constrained edge device. Secondly, we performed data augmentations on five fabric datasets and verified the adaptability of the model in different types of fabrics. Finally, we transplanted the trained model to the edge device NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and optimized the model with TensorRT to make it detection faster. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in five fabric datasets. The detection speed is up to 22.7 frame per second (FPS) on the edge device Jetson TX2. Compared with the cloud-based method, the response time is reduced by 2.5 times, with the capability of real-time industrial defect detection.