The need to overcome the challenges of visual inspections conducted by domain experts drives the recent surge in visual inspection research. Typical manual industrial data analysis and inspection for defects conducted by trained personnel are expensive, time-consuming, and characterized by mistakes. Thus, an efficient intelligent-driven model is needed to eliminate or minimize the challenges of defect identification and elimination in processes to the barest minimum. This paper presents a robust method for recognizing and classifying defects in industrial products using a deep-learning architectural ensemble approach integrated with a weighted sequence meta-learning unification framework. In the proposed method, a unique base model is constructed and fused together with other co-learning pretrained models using a sequence-driven meta-learning ensembler that aggregates the best features learned from the various contributing models for better and superior performance. During experimentation in the study, different publicly available industrial product datasets consisting of the defect and non-defect samples were used to train, validate, and test the introduced model, with remarkable results obtained that demonstrate the viability of the proposed method in tackling the challenges of the manual visual inspection approach.
Keywords: conv-LSTM; deep learning ensemble; defect recognition and classification; industrial products; product quality control; visual inspection.