Use Case: Casting Defect Detection

Overview

Casting is a manufacturing process in which a liquid material is usually poured into a mould, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then is allowed to solidify.

A casting defect is an undesired irregularity in a metal casting process. There are many types of defects in casting like blow holes, pinholes, burr, shrinkage defects, mould material defects, pouring metal defects, metallurgical defects, etc. Defects are an unwanted thing in the casting industry. For removing this defective product, all industry have their quality inspection department. But the main problem is that this inspection process is carried out manually. It is a very time-consuming process and due to human accuracy, this is not 100% accurate. This can lead to the rejection of the whole order which creates a big loss to the company.

Casting defect detection automates the inspection process by utilizing the power of deep learning algorithms.

For the purpose of showcasing this use case, we followed these steps:

Prerequisites

Download the CastingDefectDetectionDemoProject.zip file which contains the following files:

Running the demo scripts requires:

Casting defect detection

This section deals with the basic data science steps of creating a casting defect detection model using Machine Learning Workbench with the open-source Kaggle dataset. Follow the sections below for downloading data, building a neural network architecture, transfer learning with MobileNet, training the model, deploying the model to production and using the same to detect defects in the casts.

Kaggle dataset

We have downloaded the open-source Kaggle dataset from https://www.kaggle.com/ravirajsinh45/real-life-industrial-dataset-of-casting-product.

All the images provided with this dataset are the top view of the submersible pump impeller.

The dataset contains 7340 images in total. These are all grey-scaled images of the size 300x300 pixels. The augmentation is already applied in all the images.

There are mainly two categories:

  1. Defective
  2. Ok

For training a classification model, the data is split into a train and a validation folder. Both folders contain def_front and ok_front subfolders.

Uploading the project to MLW

Log in to the MLW and follow the steps described in Machine Learning Workbench > Upload a project to upload the CastingDefectDetectionDemoProject.zip project to MLW. This might take a few minutes depending on your internet bandwidth.

After the project is uploaded sucessfully, navigate to the Data folder of the project. You should see 3 data files, 5 code files, and 1 architecture file within the project.

Training the model

Method 1: Creating/Using a custom deep neural network architecture

  1. Follow the steps described in Machine Learning Workbench > Neural Network (NN) Designer and create a new architecture file named castingModelDesigner.architecture with “None” as Architecture. Alternatively, use the already available architecture file (castingModelDesigner) which exists within the project. Jump to step 4 if you are doing the latter.

  2. Select the castingModelDesigner.architecture file and click the edit icon Edit to open an interface/editor to build your own deep neural network architecture by dragging and dropping various layers available in the menu at the left.

  3. Build a deep neural network architecture using the example shown below and save:

    Design

  4. Train the deep neural network model by setting the Training Parameters as shown below:

    TrainParams

  5. To monitor the model building progress, click Tasks in the navigator and click castingDefectModel. The training time is generally 30-50 minutes for 10 epochs for this particular dataset. Initially, the task status is INITIALISING and gets changed to TRAINING STARTED once the training starts.

    After the training is complete, the task status will be set to COMPLETED and a model named castingDefectModel.onnx is saved to the Model folder.

Method 2: Training a model in Jupyter Notebook using the transfer learning technique with Mobilenet architecture

  1. In the Code folder of the project, click castingDefectDetectionDemo.ipynb to view the metadata of the file.

  2. Click the edit icon Edit to open the Jupyter Notebook and execute all the cells in sequence.

Once all the cells are executed successfully, a model named castingDefectModelViaJNB.onnx is saved to the Model folder.

Deploying the model using the inference pipeline

Now that the model is successfully trained (by any of the above two training methods) and available for serving in the form of an ONNX file, you can create an inference pipeline for deploying the model to production.

Depending on the training method used, use the relevant Python scripts.

The inference pipeline uses a pre-processing script, a model (.onnx file) and a post-processing script.

  import numpy as np
  from PIL import Image
  import io
  def process(content):
      im = Image.open(io.BytesIO(content)).convert('RGB')
      im = im.resize((250,250))
      x = np.array(im,dtype=np.float32)
      x *= 1./255
      x = np.expand_dims(x,0)
      return {"Conv2D_input":x}

  def process(content):
      import numpy as np
      classes = ["defective","ok"]
      cla = classes[np.argmax(content[0])]
      return {"Dense":content[0].tolist(),"PredictedClass":cla}

  1. Follow the steps described in Machine Learning Workbench > Inference pipeline and create an inference pipeline named castingPipeline.pipeline by selecting ‘castingDefectModel.onnx’ as Model, ‘castingPreProcessingForNN.py’ as Pre-processing Script and ‘castingPostProcessingForNN.py’ as Post-processing Script if you have used Method 1. If you have used Method 2, select ‘castingDefectModelViaJNB.onnx’ as Model, ‘castingPreProcessingForJNB.py’ as Pre-processing Script and ‘castingPostProcessingForJNB.py’ as Post-processing Script.

    This creates a new pipeline file named castingPipeline.pipeline in the Inference Pipeline folder. you will be able to see the metadata of the pipeline file by clicking on it.

  2. Deploy the pipeline to the production.

Predictions using the deployed pipeline

Now that the inference pipeline is successfully deployed to production and available for serving, you can make predictions using the test data.

Navigate to the Data folder and select testDefectImage.PNG. Predict the class of image using castingPipeline.

The predictions file will be stored in the Data folder with the name testDefectImage_timeStamp.json. Edit the predictions JSON file to view the predictions.