Effect of Environmental Factors on the Accuracy of a Quality Inspection System Based on Transfer Learning

Abstract

In this research, a study is introduced on the effect of several environmental factors on the performance of an already constructed quality inspection system, which was designed using a transfer learning approach based on convolutional neural networks. The system comprised two sets of layers, transferred layers set from an already trained model (DenseNet121) and a custom classification layers set. It was designed to discriminate between damaged and undamaged helical gears according to the configuration of the gear regardless to its dimensions, and the model showed good performance discriminating between the two products at ideal conditions of high-resolution images. So, this study aimed at testing the system performance at poor settings of lighting, background, distance and camera resolution. Experimental results implied that the system was able to show high accuracies above 90% at very bad settings and around 99% at good settings, which assures that an inspection system with good performance can be built at low costs.