A Semantic Information Decomposition Network for Accurate Segmentation of Texture Defects

Defect detection on textured surfaces remains a challenging task due to the wide range of textures and defects. Current unsupervised learning-based texture defect detection methods based on texture background reconstruction cannot detect texture defects with high precision because it is difficult to guarantee a high-precision reconstruction of the texture background while suppressing the defect foreground. In this study, we propose a novel semantic information decomposition network (SIDN) for accurate texture defect segmentation. The SIDN is trained on artificial defective images produced by a defect generation module (DGM). First, the SIDN uses a feature extraction module (FEM) to extract latent features with both texture semantic information and defect semantic information. Then, a novel feature separation extraction module (FSEM) for decomposing the texture semantic information and defect semantic information from the feature map generated by the FEM is proposed, preventing the coupling of the texture and defect semantic information from affecting the final segmentation accuracy. Next, a novel global semantic relation module (GSRM) is proposed to determine the relevance of the global semantic information to comprehensively consider the context and improve the feature representation. Finally, a segmentation module (SM) that directly segments the textures and defects instead of reconstructing the texture background is proposed. The final detection result is obtained by calculating a weighted average of the texture and defect segmentation results. The extensive experimental tests with the most popular and most challenging texture defect dataset demonstrate that the SIDN achieves accurate segmentation of various texture defects without using real defect samples.