Fast semantic segmentation method for machine vision inspection based on a fewer-parameters atrous convolution neural network

PLoS One. 2021 Feb 10;16(2):e0246093. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246093. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Owing to the recent development in deep learning, machine vision has been widely used in intelligent manufacturing equipment in multiple fields, including precision-manufacturing production lines and online product-quality inspection. This study aims at online Machine Vision Inspection, focusing on the method of online semantic segmentation under complex backgrounds. First, the fewer-parameters optimization of the atrous convolution architecture is studied. Atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and residual network (ResNet) are selected as the basic architectures of ηseg and ηmain, respectively, which indicate that the improved proportion of the participating input image feature is beneficial for improving the accuracy of feature extraction during the change of the number and dimension of feature maps. Second, this study proposes five modified ResNet residual building blocks, with the main path having a 3 × 3 convolution layer, 2 × 2 skip path, and pooling layer with ls = 2, which can improve the use of image features. Finally, the simulation experiments show that our modified structure can significantly decrease segmentation time Tseg from 719 to 296 ms (decreased by 58.8%), with only a slight decrease in the intersection-over-union from 86.7% to 86.6%. The applicability of the proposed machine vision method was verified through the segmentation recognition of the China Yuan (CNY) for the 2019 version. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed model of semantic segmentation visual detection effectively reduces the detection time while ensuring the detection accuracy and has a significant effect of fewer-parameters optimization. This slows for the possibility of neural network detection on mobile terminals.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Deep Learning*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Semantics

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province, China under Grant 2019B010154003, and in part by the Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project under Grant 201802030006.