A Comprehensive Investigation into Strip Steel Defect Detection using Traditional Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models

The steel manufacturing sector places great importance on guaranteeing the quality of strip steel products, which has led to a thorough investigation of defect detection approaches. This work conducts a comparative analysis of traditional machine learning and deep learning models to determine their efficacy in detecting defects in strip steel. Our analysis is based on a dataset that includes a variety of images of strip steel surfaces showing different types of defects. In this work, we adopt image preprocessing techniques to improve the quality of input images prior to the application of classification methods. We employ traditional ML algorithms including Support Vector Machine and Random Forest, and deep learning model AlexNet Convolutional Neural Networks for effective defect classification. Consequently, we present comparative evaluations that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, considering accuracy scores.