Classification of Defective Fabrics Using Capsule Networks

Abstract

Fabric quality has an important role in the textile sector. Fabric defect, which is a highly important factor that influences the fabric quality, has become a concept that researchers are trying to minimize. Due to the limited capacity of human resources, human-based defect detection results in low performance and significant loss of time. To overcome human-based limited capacity, computer vision-based methods have emerged. Thanks to new additions to these methods over time, fabric defect detection methods have begun to show almost one hundred percent performance. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) play a leading role in this high-performance success. However, Convolutional Neural Networks cause information loss in the pooling process. Capsule Networks is a useful technique for minimizing information loss. This paper proposes Capsule Networks, a new generation method that represents an alternative to Convolutional Neural Networks for deep learning tasks. TILDA dataset as source data for training and testing phases are employed. The model is trained for 100, 200, and 270 epoch times. Model performance is evaluated based on accuracy, recall, and precision performance metrics. Compared to mainstream deep learning algorithms, this method offers improved performance in terms of accuracy. This method has been performed under different circumstances and has achieved a performance value of 98.7%. The main contributions of this study are to use Capsule Networks in the fabric defect detection domain and to obtain a significant performance result.