Machine learning approaches to manufacturing and materials: Applications to semi-supervised, unbalanced and heterogeneous data problems

The objective of this thesis is to use machine learning and deep learning techniques for the quality assurance of metal casting processes. Metal casting can be defined as a process in which liquid metal is poured into a mold of a desired shape and allowed to solidify. The process is completed after ejection of the final solidified component, also known as a casting, out of the mold. There may be undesired irregularities in the metal casting process known as casting defects. Among the defects that are found, porosity is considered to be a major defect, which is difficult to detect, until the end of the manufacturing cycle. When there are small voids, holes or pockets found within the metal, porosity defect occurs. It is important to control and alleviate porosity below certain permissible thresholds, depending on the product that is being manufactured. If the foundry process can be modeled using machine learning approaches, to predict the state of the casting prior to completion of the casting process, it would save the foundry the inspection and testing of the casting, which requires specific attention of the staff and expensive machinery for testing. Moreover, if the casting fails the quality test, then it would be rendered useless. This is one of the major issues for the foundries today. The main aim of this project, is to make predictions about the quality of metal cast components. We determine whether under certain given conditions and parameters, a cast component would pass or fail the quality test. Although this thesis focuses on porosity defects, machine learning and deep learning techniques can be used to model any other kinds of defects such as shrinkage defects, metal pouring defects or any metallurgical defects. The other important objective is to identify the most important parameters in this casting process, that are responsible for the porosity control and ultimately the quality of the cast component. The challenges faced during the data analysis while dealing with a small sized, unbalanced, heterogeneous and semi-supervised dataset, such as this one, are also covered. We compare the results obtained using different machine learning techniques in terms of F1 score, precision and recall, among other metrics, on unseen test data post cross validation. Finally, the conclusions and scope for the future work are also discussed

Cross-Lingual Adaptation for Type Inference

Deep learning-based techniques have been widely applied to the program analysis tasks, in fields such as type inference, fault localization, and code summarization. Hitherto deep learning-based software engineering systems rely thoroughly on supervised learning approaches, which require laborious manual effort to collect and label a prohibitively large amount of data. However, most Turing-complete imperative languages share similar control- and data-flow structures, which make it possible to transfer knowledge learned from one language to another. In this paper, we propose cross-lingual adaptation of program analysis, which allows us to leverage prior knowledge learned from the labeled dataset of one language and transfer it to the others. Specifically, we implemented a cross-lingual adaptation framework, PLATO, to transfer a deep learning-based type inference procedure across weakly typed languages, e.g., Python to JavaScript and vice versa. PLATO incorporates a novel joint graph kernelized attention based on abstract syntax tree and control flow graph, and applies anchor word augmentation across different languages. Besides, by leveraging data from strongly typed languages, PLATO improves the perplexity of the backbone cross-programming-language model and the performance of downstream cross-lingual transfer for type inference. Experimental results illustrate that our framework significantly improves the transferability over the baseline method by a large margin

A survey on generative adversarial networks for imbalance problems in computer vision tasks

Any computer vision application development starts off by acquiring images and data, then preprocessing and pattern recognition steps to perform a task. When the acquired images are highly imbalanced and not adequate, the desired task may not be achievable. Unfortunately, the occurrence of imbalance problems in acquired image datasets in certain complex real-world problems such as anomaly detection, emotion recognition, medical image analysis, fraud detection, metallic surface defect detection, disaster prediction, etc., are inevitable. The performance of computer vision algorithms can significantly deteriorate when the training dataset is imbalanced. In recent years, Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs) have gained immense attention by researchers across a variety of application domains due to their capability to model complex real-world image data. It is particularly important that GANs can not only be used to generate synthetic images, but also its fascinating adversarial learning idea showed good potential in restoring balance in imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we examine the most recent developments of GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in image data. The real-world challenges and implementations of synthetic image generation based on GANs are extensively covered in this survey. Our survey first introduces various imbalance problems in computer vision tasks and its existing solutions, and then examines key concepts such as deep generative image models and GANs. After that, we propose a taxonomy to summarize GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in computer vision tasks into three major categories: 1. Image level imbalances in classification, 2. object level imbalances in object detection and 3. pixel level imbalances in segmentation tasks. We elaborate the imbalance problems of each group, and provide GANs based solutions in each group. Readers will understand how GANs based techniques can handle the problem of imbalances and boost performance of the computer vision algorithms

Application of deep learning methods in materials microscopy for the quality assessment of lithium-ion batteries and sintered NdFeB magnets

Die Qualitätskontrolle konzentriert sich auf die Erkennung von Produktfehlern und die Überwachung von Aktivitäten, um zu überprüfen, ob die Produkte den gewünschten Qualitätsstandard erfüllen. Viele Ansätze für die Qualitätskontrolle verwenden spezialisierte Bildverarbeitungssoftware, die auf manuell entwickelten Merkmalen basiert, die von Fachleuten entwickelt wurden, um Objekte zu erkennen und Bilder zu analysieren. Diese Modelle sind jedoch mühsam, kostspielig in der Entwicklung und schwer zu pflegen, während die erstellte Lösung oft spröde ist und für leicht unterschiedliche Anwendungsfälle erhebliche Anpassungen erfordert. Aus diesen Gründen wird die Qualitätskontrolle in der Industrie immer noch häufig manuell durchgeführt, was zeitaufwändig und fehleranfällig ist. Daher schlagen wir einen allgemeineren datengesteuerten Ansatz vor, der auf den jüngsten Fortschritten in der Computer-Vision-Technologie basiert und Faltungsneuronale Netze verwendet, um repräsentative Merkmale direkt aus den Daten zu lernen. Während herkömmliche Methoden handgefertigte Merkmale verwenden, um einzelne Objekte zu erkennen, lernen Deep-Learning-Ansätze verallgemeinerbare Merkmale direkt aus den Trainingsproben, um verschiedene Objekte zu erkennen. In dieser Dissertation werden Modelle und Techniken für die automatisierte Erkennung von Defekten in lichtmikroskopischen Bildern von materialografisch präparierten Schnitten entwickelt. Wir entwickeln Modelle zur Defekterkennung, die sich grob in überwachte und unüberwachte Deep-Learning-Techniken einteilen lassen. Insbesondere werden verschiedene überwachte Deep-Learning-Modelle zur Erkennung von Defekten in der Mikrostruktur von Lithium-Ionen-Batterien entwickelt, von binären Klassifizierungsmodellen, die auf einem Sliding-Window-Ansatz mit begrenzten Trainingsdaten basieren, bis hin zu komplexen Defekterkennungs- und Lokalisierungsmodellen, die auf ein- und zweistufigen Detektoren basieren. Unser endgültiges Modell kann mehrere Klassen von Defekten in großen Mikroskopiebildern mit hoher Genauigkeit und nahezu in Echtzeit erkennen und lokalisieren. Das erfolgreiche Trainieren von überwachten Deep-Learning-Modellen erfordert jedoch in der Regel eine ausreichend große Menge an markierten Trainingsbeispielen, die oft nicht ohne weiteres verfügbar sind und deren Beschaffung sehr kostspielig sein kann. Daher schlagen wir zwei Ansätze vor, die auf unbeaufsichtigtem Deep Learning zur Erkennung von Anomalien in der Mikrostruktur von gesinterten NdFeB-Magneten basieren, ohne dass markierte Trainingsdaten benötigt werden. Die Modelle sind in der Lage, Defekte zu erkennen, indem sie aus den Trainingsdaten indikative Merkmale von nur "normalen" Mikrostrukturmustern lernen. Wir zeigen experimentelle Ergebnisse der vorgeschlagenen Fehlererkennungssysteme, indem wir eine Qualitätsbewertung an kommerziellen Proben von Lithium-Ionen-Batterien und gesinterten NdFeB-Magneten durchführen

Physics-Informed Computer Vision: A Review and Perspectives

Incorporation of physical information in machine learning frameworks are opening and transforming many application domains. Here the learning process is augmented through the induction of fundamental knowledge and governing physical laws. In this work we explore their utility for computer vision tasks in interpreting and understanding visual data. We present a systematic literature review of formulation and approaches to computer vision tasks guided by physical laws. We begin by decomposing the popular computer vision pipeline into a taxonomy of stages and investigate approaches to incorporate governing physical equations in each stage. Existing approaches in each task are analyzed with regard to what governing physical processes are modeled, formulated and how they are incorporated, i.e. modify data (observation bias), modify networks (inductive bias), and modify losses (learning bias). The taxonomy offers a unified view of the application of the physics-informed capability, highlighting where physics-informed learning has been conducted and where the gaps and opportunities are. Finally, we highlight open problems and challenges to inform future research. While still in its early days, the study of physics-informed computer vision has the promise to develop better computer vision models that can improve physical plausibility, accuracy, data efficiency and generalization in increasingly realistic applications

Transfer Learning Approaches In The Domain Of Radial-Axial Ring Rolling For Machine Learning Applications

Due to increased data accessibility, data-centric approaches, such as machine learning, are getting more represented in the forming industry to improve resource efficiency and to optimise processes. Prior research shows, that a classification of the roundness of shaped rings, using machine learning algorithms, is applicable to radial-axial ring rolling. The accuracy of these predictions nowadays is still limited by the amount and quality of the data. Therefore, this paper will focus on how to make the best use of the limited amount of data, using transfer learning approaches. Since acquiring data for homogenised databases is time, energy and resource consuming, logged data gathered by the industry is often used in research. This paper takes both, industrial data from thyssenkrupp rothe erde Germany GmbH and a smaller dataset of an inhouse research plant, into account. Additionally, a synthetic dataset, created by generative adversarial networks, is considered. To accomplish an improvement of machine learning predictions using accessible data, three transfer learning approaches are investigated in order to extend existing models: (I) transferring from a radial-axial ring rolling mill to a different mill containing less available data with a ratio of 20:1, (II) learning from unlabelled data using an autoencoder and (III) training on synthetic data. The obtained improvements are further evaluated. Based on these results, future possible investigations are elaborated, in particular the consideration of transfer learning from the less complex cold ring rolling process

Deep CNN-Based Automated Optical Inspection for Aerospace Components

ABSTRACT The defect detection problem is of outmost importance in high-tech industries such as aerospace manufacturing and is widely employed using automated industrial quality control systems. In the aerospace manufacturing industry, composite materials are extensively applied as structural components in civilian and military aircraft. To ensure the quality of the product and high reliability, manual inspection and traditional automatic optical inspection have been employed to identify the defects throughout production and maintenance. These inspection techniques have several limitations such as tedious, time- consuming, inconsistent, subjective, labor intensive, expensive, etc. To make the operation effective and efficient, modern automated optical inspection needs to be preferred. In this dissertation work, automatic defect detection techniques are tested on three levels using a novel aerospace composite materials image dataset (ACMID). First, classical machine learning models, namely, Support Vector Machine and Random Forest, are employed for both datasets. Second, deep CNN-based models, such as improved ResNet50 and MobileNetV2 architectures are trained on ACMID datasets. Third, an efficient defect detection technique that combines the features of deep learning and classical machine learning model is proposed for ACMID dataset. To assess the aerospace composite components, all the models are trained and tested on ACMID datasets with distinct sizes. In addition, this work investigates the scenario when defective and non-defective samples are scarce and imbalanced. To overcome the problems of imbalanced and scarce datasets, oversampling techniques and data augmentation using improved deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGAN) are considered. Furthermore, the proposed models are also validated using one of the benchmark steel surface defects (SSD) dataset