Multi-Scale Time Series Segmentation Network Based on Eddy Current Testing for Detecting Surface Metal Defects

Abstract

In high-risk industrial environments like nuclear power plants, precise defect identification and localization are essential for maintaining production stability and safety. However, the complexity of such a harsh environment leads to significant variations in the shape and size of the defects. To address this challenge, we propose the multivariate time series segmentation network (MSSN), which adopts a multiscale convolutional network with multi-stage and depth-separable convolutions for efficient feature extraction through variable-length templates. To tackle the classification difficulty caused by structural signal variance, MSSN employs logarithmic normalization to adjust instance distributions. Furthermore, it integrates classification with smoothing loss functions to accurately identify defect segments amid similar structural and defect signal subsequences. Our algorithm evaluated on both the Mackey-Glass dataset and industrial dataset achieves over 95% localization and demonstrates the capture capability on the synthetic dataset. In a nuclear plant's heat transfer tube dataset, it captures 90% of defect instances with 75% middle localization F1 score.