A comparison study on anomaly detection methods in manufacturing process monitoring with X-ray images

Process monitoring and anomaly detection in manufacturing production systems are of vital importance in the consistency, reliability, and quality of manufacturing operations, which motivates the development of a large number of anomaly detection methods. In this work, a comparison study on representative unsupervised X-ray image based anomaly detection methods is conducted. Statistical, physical, and deep learning based dimension reduction methods and different anomaly detection criteria are considered and compared. Case studies on real-world X-ray image data with simulated anomalies and real anomalies are both carried out. Grey level co-occurrence matrix with Hotelling $$T^2$$ T 2 statistic as detection criteria achieves the best performance on the simulated anomalies case with an overall detection accuracy of 96%. Principal component analysis with reconstruction error as criteria obtains the highest detection rate of 90.6% in the real anomalies case. Considering the ever-growing availability of image data in intelligent manufacturing processes, this study will provide very useful knowledge and find a broad audience.