CANet: Context-aware Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection of Surface Defects*

Surface defect detection has become more and more important in the industrial manufacture and engineering application in recent years. However, due to the lack of overall perception and interaction among features layers, lots of computer vision-based detection methods cannot grab the complete details of defects when dealing with complex scenes, such as low contrast and irregular shape. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Context-aware Aggregation Network (CANet) to accurately pop-out the defects, where we focus on the mining of context cues and the fusion of multiple context features. To be specific, embarking on the multi-level deep features extracted by encoder, we first deploy a sufficient exploration to dig the context information by deploying the weighted convolution pyramid (WCP) module, which extracts multi-scale context features, transfers the information flow between different resolution features, and fuses the features with same resolution. By this way, we can obtain the effective context pyramid features. Then, the decoder deploys the weighted context attention (WCA) module to filter the irrelevant information from context features and employs the cascaded fusion structure (CFS) to aggregate the multiple context cues in a hierarchical way. Following this way, the generated high-quality saliency maps can highlight the defects accurately and completely. Extensive experiments are performed on four public datasets, and the results firmly prove the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed CANet under different evaluation metrics.