Detecting additive manufacturing anomalies with shallow convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Additive manufacturing often known as 3D printing, has been significant in the manufacturing industry in recent decades. However, the method encounters significant challenges in the form of printing errors, adversely impacting end-user product experience and obstacles to widespread adoption. The current manual and sensor-based continuous monitoring techniques lack a clear distinction between anomalies and healthy data points, making them ineffective for implementation in industrial environments. This research introduces a computer vision-based methodology for detecting anomalies in real-time. Two Convolutional Neural Networks versions are created, Model V1 using residual connection with decreased parameters and computational complexity and Model V2 to facilitate effortless deployment on constraint devices without compromising performance. The proposed CNN networks are evaluated against state-of-the-art classification models, namely ResNet18, ResNet34, and Deep LSTM classifier, to assess their performance. Model V1 and Model V2 achieved comparable performances with 86.7% and 11.86% reduced parameters compared to ResNet18. Afterward, quantization is applied to produce a compact model representation for edge-device deployment. The quantization model proposed has no loss in performance. Lastly, an inference study is conducted on multiple edge devices where the TI AM68A board proved fast, with 0.246 and 0.04 s inference time for models V1 and V2 respectively.