U-SAMNet: Uncertainty-Aware Self-Attention Multi-Task Network for Pore Detection in Additive Manufacturing

Reliable pore detection in in situ monitoring is essential for quality control in additive manufacturing, particularly in safety-critical applications. However, existing automated approaches often struggle with low-quality images, computational inefficiency, and the lack of reliable uncertainty estimates to identify the pores accurately. To address these limitations, this paper proposes U-SAMNet, an Uncertainty-Aware Self-Attention Multi-Task Network. The model jointly performs pore segmentation, image-level classification, and denoising on in situ monitoring images, while deriving epistemic uncertainty via Monte Carlo dropout variance to dynamically suppress unreliable attention features. This study uses electron-optical (ELO) images from the E-PBF process. A novel Uncertainty Guidance Attention (UGA) block is introduced. It suppresses channel attention weights using inverted uncertainty estimates. Unlike prior methods that modulate classification weights, U-SAMNet operates on pixel-wise feature maps. The model has only 1.69 M parameters. A single forward pass takes 17.46 ms per image, while uncertainty estimation is performed through multiple Monte Carlo dropout passes. The model was evaluated on real E-PBF images and achieved 99.42% pixel accuracy, 85.31% F1-score, and 74.38% IoU on a held-out test set of 43 real images. It also generalizes to other industrial defect detection benchmarks, reaching 85.09% F1-score on DAGM 2007 and 82.32% on DeepCrack. GAN-synthesized training data improves the F1-score by 21.34 percentage points over rotation augmentation alone. Ablation studies confirm that each component contributes meaningfully to the final performance.