A Real-Time Dual-Task Defect Segmentation Network for Grinding Wheels with Coordinate Attentioned-ASP and Masked Autoencoder

The current network for the dual-task grinding wheel defect semantic segmentation lacks high-precision lightweight designs, making it challenging to balance lightweighting and segmentation accuracy, thus severely limiting its practical application in grinding wheel production lines. Additionally, recent approaches for addressing the natural class imbalance in defect segmentation fail to leverage the inexhaustible unannotated raw data on the production line, posing huge data wastage. Targeting these two issues, firstly, by discovering the similarity between Coordinate Attention (CA) and ASPP, this study has introduced a novel lightweight CA-ASP module to the DeeplabV3+, which is 45.3% smaller in parameter size and 53.2% lower in FLOPs compared to the ASPP, while achieving better segmentation precision. Secondly, we have innovatively leveraged the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to address imbalance. By developing a new Hybrid MAE and applying it to self-supervised pretraining on tremendous unannotated data, we have significantly uplifted the network’s semantic understanding on the minority classes, which leads to further rises in both the overall accuracy and accuracy of the minorities without additional computational growth. Lastly, transfer learning has been deployed to fully utilize the highly related dual tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods with a real-time latency of 9.512 ms obtain a superior segmentation accuracy on the mIoU score over the compared real-time state-of-the-art methods, excelling in managing the imbalance and ensuring stability on the complicated scenes across the dual tasks.