A Novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network Based on ResNet-18 and Transfer Learning for Detection of Wood Knot Defects

Wood defects are quickly identified from an optical image based on deep learning methodology, which effectively improves wood utilization. Traditional neural network techniques have not yet been employed for wood defect detection due to long training time, low recognition accuracy, and nonautomatical extraction of defect image features. In this work, a model (so-called ReSENet-18) for wood knot defect detection that combined deep learning and transfer learning is proposed. The “squeeze-and-excitation” (SE) module is firstly embedded into the “residual basic block” structure for a “SE-Basic-Block” module construction. This model has the advantages of the features that are extracted in the channel dimension, and it is fused in multiscale with original features. Instantaneously, the fully connected layer is replaced with a global average pooling; consequently, the model parameters could be reduced effectively. The experimental results show that the accuracy has reached 99.02%, meanwhile the training time is also reduced. It shows that the proposed deep convolutional neural network based on ReSENet-18 combined with transfer learning can improve the accuracy of defect recognition and has a potential application in the detection of wood knot defects.