A prototype-aligned multi-scale attention network for few-shot industrial surface defect detection
- 1School of Computer and Information Technology, Anhui Vocational and Technical College, Hefei, Anhui, China
- 2School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Anhui Water Conservancy and Hydropower Vocational and Technical College, Hefei, Anhui, China
Abstract
Few-shot industrial surface defect detection remains challenging because annotated defect images are scarce, defect scales vary considerably, and textured backgrounds can cause false responses. This study proposes a Prototype-Aligned Multi-Scale Attention Network (PA-MSAN) that integrates multi-receptive-field feature extraction, spatial-channel attention, and region of interest (RoI)-level prototype matching within a two-stage detector. Experiments are conducted on NEU-DET under 1-shot, 3-shot, and 5-shot episode settings, with 5-shot cross-domain evaluation on GC10-DET using target-domain support prototypes. Multi-scale feature-pyramid fusion represents local textures and broader defect morphology, while attention weighting enhances defect-sensitive regions and channels before region proposal network (RPN) proposal generation and RoI Align. Few-shot classification is performed by cosine similarity between RoI features and class prototypes, and training jointly optimizes detection classification, bounding-box regression, region proposal, and Prototype Alignment Loss (PAL). Under the 5-shot NEU-DET setting, PA-MSAN achieves 92.2 ± 0.4% mean average precision (mAP)@0.5, 88.7 ± 0.4% small-object average precision (APsmall), 0.89 ± 0.01 average intersection over union (IoU), and a 4.1 ± 0.2% background false response rate, with 23.4 ms detection time and 18.7 × 10⁶ parameters. Compared with Faster R-CNN, PA-MSAN improves [email protected] by 2.9 percentage points and APsmall by 3.9 percentage points while reducing the background false response rate by 1.7 percentage points. Under the 5-shot target-domain support setting, PA-MSAN achieves 86.4 ± 0.4% [email protected] on GC10-DET, 5.8 percentage points (6.3%) below the corresponding NEU-DET result. The results support region-level prototype alignment for limited-label metallic surface inspection under the evaluated datasets and two-stage configuration.
Related
- Facile smartphone-assisted colorimetric detection of high-load Hg2+ in industrial wastewater using a silica-supported ion-imprinted polymer
- Microwave-Treated Structural and Network Changes in Filled Industrial EPDM Waste: Effects of Particle Size and Exposure Time
- Normal-Data-Only Fault Detection and Faulty-Cell Localization in Heterogeneous Electric-Vehicle Battery Packs Using a Hotspot-Suppressed and Alarm-Consistent Dual-Branch Attention Transformer
- YOLO-CBNet: A robust attention-enhanced detection framework for underwater fish recognition in aquaculture environments
- Multi-scale feature fusion network optimization and edge intelligent detection for transmission line insulator
BibTeX
@article{huang2026prototypealigned,
title = {{A prototype-aligned multi-scale attention network for few-shot industrial surface defect detection}},
author = {Rubing Huang and Lianyi Zhao},
journal = {PLOS One},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0359400},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359400},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - A prototype-aligned multi-scale attention network for few-shot industrial surface defect detection
AU - Rubing Huang
AU - Lianyi Zhao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
JO - PLOS One
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0359400
UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359400
AB - Few-shot industrial surface defect detection remains challenging because annotated defect images are scarce, defect scales vary considerably, and textured backgrounds can cause false responses. This study proposes a Prototype-Aligned Multi-Scale Attention Network (PA-MSAN) that integrates multi-receptive-field feature extraction, spatial-channel attention, and region of interest (RoI)-level prototype matching within a two-stage detector. Experiments are conducted on NEU-DET under 1-shot, 3-shot, and 5-shot episode settings, with 5-shot cross-domain evaluation on GC10-DET using target-domain support prototypes. Multi-scale feature-pyramid fusion represents local textures and broader defect morphology, while attention weighting enhances defect-sensitive regions and channels before region proposal network (RPN) proposal generation and RoI Align. Few-shot classification is performed by cosine similarity between RoI features and class prototypes, and training jointly optimizes detection classification, bounding-box regression, region proposal, and Prototype Alignment Loss (PAL). Under the 5-shot NEU-DET setting, PA-MSAN achieves 92.2 ± 0.4% mean average precision (mAP)@0.5, 88.7 ± 0.4% small-object average precision (APsmall), 0.89 ± 0.01 average intersection over union (IoU), and a 4.1 ± 0.2% background false response rate, with 23.4 ms detection time and 18.7 × 10⁶ parameters. Compared with Faster R-CNN, PA-MSAN improves [email protected] by 2.9 percentage points and APsmall by 3.9 percentage points while reducing the background false response rate by 1.7 percentage points. Under the 5-shot target-domain support setting, PA-MSAN achieves 86.4 ± 0.4% [email protected] on GC10-DET, 5.8 percentage points (6.3%) below the corresponding NEU-DET result. The results support region-level prototype alignment for limited-label metallic surface inspection under the evaluated datasets and two-stage configuration.
SN - 1932-6203
ER -