Ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks With Knowledge Transfer for Leather Defect Classification in Industrial Settings

Leather defect analysis is important for leather quality grading which directly effects the leather exports. Automated leather sample classification is vital due to slow and subjective nature of the manual process. The major challenges that exist in visual inspection of leather samples for categorization are: the morphology of defects significantly differs and their close examples are not available for transfer learning, unavailability of publicly available data and a benchmark. In this paper, we discuss three important aspects in the identification of industrial leather defects, i.e. the creation of an annotated wet-blue leather image dataset, the transfer of information from different domains to the leather image domain and the design of ensemble networks tailored to the task. We are therefore introducing a new database of wet-blue leather images (Wet-blue Leather Image Dataset (WBLID)) for the classification of defects along with expert annotation data. We proposed a new network EfficientNet-B3+ ResNext-101. The proposed EfficientNet-B3+ ResNext-101 ensemble architecture significantly outperforms all other state-of-the-art methods in terms of AUC and F1-score.