A Deep Convolutional Autoencoder-Based Approach for Anomaly Detection With Industrial, Non-Images, 2-Dimensional Data: A Semiconductor Manufacturing Case Study

In manufacturing industries, it is of fundamental importance to detect anomalies in production in order to meet the required quality goals and to limit the number of defective products that are accidentally delivered to the customers. Nevertheless, monitoring systems currently employed in production are typically very simple and rely on a set of univariate control charts that fail to capture the multivariate and complex nature of real-world industrial systems. In such context, Machine Learning (ML)-based approaches for Anomaly Detection (AD) have proven to be extremely effective in increasing anomalies detectability and, in general, in enhancing monitoring procedures. However, industrial data are typically very complex and not suitable to be fed directly to classical ML-based AD tools making feature extraction procedures a necessary step that unfortunately may lead to information loss and low scalability. Deep Learning, has proven very effective at learning useful representations of complex data in an automatic way. In this paper, we propose an AD pipeline that makes use of convolutional autoencoders to extract useful features from two-dimensional, non-image, data. We test our approach on real world Optical Emission Spectroscopy data that are typical of semiconductor manufacturing and we achieve improved performance over classical monitoring methods.
Note to Practitioners
—Advanced monitoring is one of the most important task in the context of Industry 4.0. Some of the main issues in developing Machine Learning-based solutions in industrial environment are: (i) the lack of reliable tagged data; (ii) the complexity of data structures present in real-world scenarios. In this paper we investigate unsupervised anomaly detection for 2-dimensional data in manufacturing environment: we provide an approach that exploit Deep Learning-based architecture for handling the data at hand. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real world case study related to optical emission spectroscopy data in semiconductor manufacturing process providing satisfactory classification accuracy.