Industrial cylinder liner defect detection using a transformer with a block division and mask mechanism

In the field of artificial intelligence, a large number of promising tools, such as condition-based maintenance, are available for large internal combustion engines. The cylinder liner, which is a key engine component, is subject to defects due to the manufacturing process. In addition, the cylinder liner straightforwardly affects the usage and safety of the internal combustion engine. Currently, the detection of cylinder liner quality mainly depends on manual human detection. However, this type of detection is destructive, time-consuming, and expensive. In this paper, a new cylinder liner defect database is proposed. The goal of this research is to develop a nondestructive yet reliable method for quantifying the surface condition of the cylinder liner. For this purpose, we propose a transformer method with a block division and mask mechanism on our newly collected cylinder liner defect database to automatically detect defects. Specifically, we first use a local defect dataset to train the transformer network. With a hierarchical-level architecture and attention mechanism, multi-level and discriminative feature are obtained. Then, we combine the transformer network with the block division method to detect defects in 64 local regions, and merge their results for the high-resolution image. The block division method can be used to resolve the difficulty of the in detecting the small defect. Finally, we design a mask to suppress the influence of noise. All methods allow us to achieve higher accuracy results than state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, we show the baseline results on the new database.