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 K values. Finally, our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms current mainstream methods, greatly enhancing the efficiency of factory operations.