  Data-hunger and data-imbalance are two major pitfalls in many deep learning
approaches. For example, on highly optimized production lines, defective
samples are hardly acquired while non-defective samples come almost for free.
The defects however often seem to resemble each other, e.g., scratches on
different products may only differ in a few characteristics. In this work, we
introduce a framework, Defect Transfer GAN (DT-GAN), which learns to represent
defect types independent of and across various background products and yet can
apply defect-specific styles to generate realistic defective images. An
empirical study on the MVTec AD and two additional datasets showcase DT-GAN
outperforms state-of-the-art image synthesis methods w.r.t. sample fidelity and
diversity in defect generation. We further demonstrate benefits for a critical
downstream task in manufacturing -- defect classification. Results show that
the augmented data from DT-GAN provides consistent gains even in the few
samples regime and reduces the error rate up to 51% compared to both
traditional and advanced data augmentation methods.
