A lightweight solution of industrial computed tomography with convolutional neural network

As an advanced non-destructive testing and quality control technique, industrial computed tomography (ICT) has found many applications in smart manufacturing. The existing ICT devices are usually bulky and involve mass data processing and transmission. It results in a low efficiency and cannot keep pace with smart manufacturing. In this paper, with the support from Internet of things (IoT) and convolutional neural network (CNN), we proposed a lightweight solution of ICT devices for smart manufacturing. It consists of efforts from two aspects: distributed hardware allocation and data reduction. At the first aspect, ICT devices are separated into four functional units: data acquisition, cloud storage, computing center and control terminals. They are distributed and interconnected by IoT. Only the data acquisition unit still remains in the production lines. This distribution not only slims the ICT device, but also permits the share of the same functional units. At the second aspect, in the data acquisition unit, sparse sampling strategy is adopted to reduce the raw data and singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to compress these data. They are then transmitted to the cloud storage. At the computing center, an ICT image reconstruction algorithm and a CNN are applied to these compressed sparse sampling data to obtain high quality CT images. The experiments with practical ICT data have been executed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed solution. The results indicate that this solution can achieve a drastic data reduction, a storage space save and an efficiency improvement without significant image degradation. The presented work has been helpful to push the applications of ICT in smart manufacturing.