A Novel Involution-Based Lightweight Network for Fabric Defect Detection

For automatic fabric defect detection with deep learning, diverse textures and defect forms are often required for a large training set. However, the computation cost of convolution neural networks (CNNs)-based models is very high. This research proposed an involution-enabled Faster R-CNN network by using the bottleneck structure of the residual network. The involution has two advantages over convolution: first, it can capture a larger range of receptive fields in the spatial dimension; then, parameters are shared in the channel dimension to reduce information redundancy, thus reducing parameters and computation. The detection performance is evaluated by Params, floating-point operations per second (FLOPs), and average precision (AP) in the collected dataset containing 6308 defective fabric images. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed involution-based network achieves a lighter model, with Params reduced to 31.21 M and FLOPs decreased to 176.19 G, compared to the Faster R-CNN’s 41.14 M Params and 206.68 G FLOPs. Additionally, it slightly improves the detection effect of large defects, increasing the AP value from 50.5% to 51.1%. The findings of this research could offer a promising solution for efficient fabric defect detection in practical textile manufacturing.