Few-Shot Early Defect Detection in Industrial Manufacturing Using Explainable Siamese Networks

Ravindu Senarathna, Nethmi Wijesinghe

Abstract: Early defect detection is essential to ensure product quality and reduce waste in industrial manufacturing. However, traditional defect detection methods rely on large labelled datasets to train models or manual inspection, both of which can be time-consuming and prone to errors. The challenge lies in developing an automated system for early anomaly detection that requires minimal labelled data, making it adaptable to various industrial environments. To address this challenge, a Siamese network, a few-shot learning technique, was utilised. The network was designed to detect defects in images of products with only a few labelled examples. A custom lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was developed for the embedding phase of the Siamese network to reduce inference time while maintaining model performance. This architecture, coupled with Explainable AI (XAI), enabled the model to provide transparent and explainable results, which is crucial for industrial applications where quick decisionmaking and understanding of model behaviour are vital.