Assembly Quality Detection Based on Class-Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning

Due to the imperfect assembly process, the unqualified assembly of a missing gasket or lead seal will affect the product’s performance and possibly cause safety accidents. Machine vision method based on deep learning has been widely used in quality inspection. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been applied in training deep learning models to reduce the burden of data annotation. The dataset obtained from the production line tends to be class-imbalanced because the assemblies are qualified in most cases. However, most SSL methods suffer from lower performance in class-imbalanced datasets. Therefore, we propose a new semi-supervised algorithm that achieves high classification accuracy on the class-imbalanced assembly dataset with limited labeled data. Based on the mean teacher algorithm, the proposed algorithm uses certainty to select reliable teacher predictions for student learning dynamically, and loss functions are modified to improve the model’s robustness against class imbalance. Results show that when only 10% of the total data are labeled, and the imbalance rate is 5.3, the proposed method can improve the accuracy from 85.34% to 93.67% compared to supervised learning. When the amount of annotated data accounts for 20%, the accuracy can reach 98.83%.