A New Image Recognition and Classification Method Combining Transfer Learning Algorithm and MobileNet Model for Welding Defects

Welding quality directly affects the welding structure's service performance and life. Hence, the effective monitoring welding defects is essential to ensure the quality of the weld structure. Owing to the non-uniformity of the shape, position and size of welding defects, it is a complicated task to analyze and evaluate the acquired welding defects images manually. Fortunately, deep learning has been successfully applied to image analysis and target recognition. However, the use of deep learning to identify welding defects is time-consuming and less accurate due to the lack of adequate training data samples, which easily cause redundancy into the classifier. In this situation, we proposed a new transfer learning model based on MobileNet as a welding defect feature extractor. By using the ImageNet dataset (non-welding defect data) to pre-train a MobileNet model, migrate the MobileNet model to the welding defects classification field. This article suggested a new TL-MobileNet structure by adding a new Full Connection layer (FC-128) and a Softmax classifier into a traditional model called MobileNet. The entire training process of TL-MobileNet model has been successfully optimized by the DropBlock technology and Global average pooling (GAP) method. They can effectively accelerate the convergence rate and improve the classification network generalization. By testing the proposed TL-MobileNet on the welding defects dataset, it turned out our model prediction accuracy has arrived at 97.69%. The experimental results show that in several aspects, TL-MobileNet have better performance than other transfer learning models and traditional neural network methods.