Improving the industrial defect recognition in radiographic testing by pre-training on medical radiographs

Deep learning methodologies have gained substantial traction for defect recognition in industrial radiographic testing including welds, castings and other fields. Regardless of the deep learning utilized, it has emerged as a standard configuration to use a model pre-trained from ImageNet to accelerate convergence and enhance recognition accuracy. However, there is a significant gap between the domain of natural images and industrial radiographs, raising the question of whether there might be a superior pre-training method than relying on ImageNet pre-training. Fortunately, medical radiographs are more similar to industrial radiographs than natural images because of the same imaging method. In this paper, we initially utilize numerous medical radiographic images from CheXpert dataset to train a pre-trained CNN model. Then, we apply this model to four distinct tasks within two radiographic testing scenarios to validate its advantages and generalization capabilities. Finally, experiments on multiple datasets indicate that our method brings more benefits than ImageNet pre-training or training from scratch, with a F1 score improvement of 3.41 %–13.72 % for defect classification and a mIoU improvement of 1.05 %–6.58 % for defect segmentation. It demonstrates that pre-training from medical radiographs provides a cost-free improvement for all kinds of tasks in industrial defect recognition.