Learning to Count Arbitrary Industrial Manufacturing Workpieces

Man-made workpiece counting is a routine job for manufactory workers; however, this is an error-prone task. In this article, we are interested in detecting and counting arbitrary workpieces in industrial manufacturing. Therefore, we construct a comprehensive and large-scale open-world public benchmark dataset for workpiece counting, called workpiece counting dataset, which includes 121 475 instances of workpieces from 351 different categories. We also propose a novel method for workpiece detection and counting, named two-stage workpiece counting network. The first stage of the network is to develop a class-agnostic detector to localize each workpiece instance, followed by the second stage to employ an unsupervised deep clustering strategy with the backbone network pretrained in a workpiece convolutional autoencoder for decision boundary prediction, achieving workpiece clustering under unknown values. Finally, our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms current mainstream methods, greatly enhancing the efficiency of factory operations.