  As a data-driven method, the performance of deep convolutional neural
networks (CNN) relies heavily on training data. The prediction results of
traditional networks give a bias toward larger classes, which tend to be the
background in the semantic segmentation task. This becomes a major problem for
fault detection, where the targets appear very small on the images and vary in
both types and sizes. In this paper we propose a new network architecture,
DefectNet, that offers multi-class (including but not limited to) defect
detection on highly-imbalanced datasets. DefectNet consists of two parallel
paths, which are a fully convolutional network and a dilated convolutional
network to detect large and small objects respectively. We propose a hybrid
loss maximising the usefulness of a dice loss and a cross entropy loss, and we
also employ the leaky rectified linear unit (ReLU) to deal with rare occurrence
of some targets in training batches. The prediction results show that our
DefectNet outperforms state-of-the-art networks for detecting multi-class
defects with the average accuracy improvement of approximately 10% on a wind
turbine.
