Adversarial defect synthesis for industrial products in low data regime

Synthetic defect generation is an important aid for advanced manufacturing and production processes. Industrial scenarios rely on automated image-based quality control methods to avoid time-consuming manual inspections and promptly identify products not complying with specific quality standards. However, these methods show poor performance in the case of ill-posed low-data training regimes, and the lack of defective samples, due to operational costs or privacy policies, strongly limits their large-scale applicability.To overcome these limitations, we propose an innovative architecture based on an unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation model to guide a transformation from a defect-free to a defective domain for common industrial products and propose simultaneously localizing their synthesized defects through a segmentation mask. As a performance evaluation, we measure image similarity and variability using standard metrics employed for generative models. Finally, we demonstrate that inspection networks, trained on synthesized samples, improve their accuracy in spotting real defective products.