Abstract
Deep learning method is widely used in computer vision tasks with large scale annotated datasets. However, it is a big challenge to obtain such datasets in most directions of the vision based non-destructive testing (NDT) field. Data augmentation is proved as an efficient way in dealing with the lack of large-scale annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose CycleGAN-based extra-supervised (CycleGAN-ES) to generate synthetic NDT images, where the ES is used to ensure that the bidirectional mapping are learned for corresponding label and defect. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of using the synthesized images to train deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) for defects recognition. In the experiments, we extract numbers of X-ray welding images with both defect and no-defect from the published GDXray dataset, CycleGAN-ES are used to generate the synthetic defect images based on a small number of extracted defect images and manually drawn labels which are used as a content guide. For quality verification of the synthesized defect images, we use a high-performance classifier pre-trained using big dataset to recognize the synthetic defects and show comparability of the performances of classifiers trained using synthetic defects and real defects respectively. To present the effectiveness of using the synthesized defects as an augmentation method, we train and evaluate the performances of DCNN for defects recognition with or without the synthesized defects.