Anomaly-Focused Augmentation Method for Industrial Visual Inspection

In industrial inspection, the detection of surface defects—such as scratches, dents, or other defects—is crucial for ensuring product quality. However, the limited availability of annotated images of such defects poses challenges for developing reliable detection models. This paper proposes a novel image augmentation algorithm to address this limitation by generating synthetic imperfections from a small sample set. Unlike traditional approaches that augment entire images, the proposed approach isolates defects and applies spatial transformations (e.g., rotation, shear) before blending them into background images. This allows for the creation of diverse training datasets. The algorithm employs a 2D binary map to encode the spatial relationship between defect and background regions of images and then applies an AI-driven model to generate new realistic blended images. By leveraging a generator-discriminator framework, the augmentation process is iteratively refined during training to maintain the style and texture of the original imperfections. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly enhances the performance of defect detection models compared to existing augmentation techniques while preserving the realism of the generated images.