Wavelet energy signatures and robust Bayesian neural network for visual quality recognition of nonwovens

In this paper, the visual quality recognition of nonwovens is considered as a common problem of pattern recognition that will be solved by a joint approach by combining wavelet energy signatures, Bayesian neural network, and outlier detection. In this research, 625 nonwovens images of 5 different grades, 125 each grade, are decomposed at 4 levels with wavelet base sym6, then two energy signatures, norm-1 L1 and norm-2 L2 are calculated from wavelet coefficients of each high frequency subband to train and test Bayesian neural network. To detect the outlier of training set, scaled outlier probability of training set and outlier probability of each sample are introduced. The committees of networks and the evidence criterion are employed to select the ‘most suitable’ model, given a set of candidate networks which has different numbers of hidden neurons. However, in our research with the finite industrial data, we take both the evidence criterion and the actual performance into account to determine the structure of Bayesian neural network. When the nonwoven images are decomposed at level 4, with 500 samples to training the Bayesian neural network that has 3 hidden neurons, the average recognition accuracy of test set is 99.2%. Experimental results on the 625 nonwoven images indicate that the wavelet energy signatures are expressive and powerful in characterizing texture of nonwoven images and the robust Bayesian neural network has excellent recognition performance.

Research highlights
► We propose an algorithm to recognize the visual quality of nonwovens by combing image understanding and pattern recognition method.
► The committees of networks and the evidence criterion are employed to select the ‘most suitable’ model.
► A new parameter, i.e., the ratio of the number of well determined weights and the total weights, is introduced to evaluate the redundancy of robust Bayesian neural network.