DSN-BR-Based Online Inspection Method and Application for Surface Defects of Pharmaceutical Products in Aluminum-Plastic Blister Packages

Abstract Ensuring high product quality is of paramount importance in pharmaceutical drug manufacturing, as it is subject to rigorous regulatory practices. This study presents a research focused on the development of an on-line detection method and system for identifying surface defects in pharmaceutical products packaged in aluminum-plastic blisters. Firstly, the aluminum-plastic blister packages exhibit multi-scale features and inter-class indistinction. To address this, the deep semantic network with boundary refinement (DSN-BR) model is proposed, which leverages semantic segmentation domain knowledge, to accurately segment the defects in pixel level. Additionally, a specialized image acquisition module that minimizes the impact of ambient light is established, ensuring high-quality image capture. Finally, the image acquisition module, image detection module, and data management module are designed to construct a comprehensive online surface defect detection system. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we employ a real dataset for instance verification on the implemented system. The experimental results substantiate the outstanding performance of the DSN-BR, achieving the mean intersection over union (MIoU) of 90.5%. Furthermore, the proposed system achieves an inference speed of up to 14.12 f/s, while attaining an F1-Score of 98.25%. These results demonstrate that the system meets the actual needs of the enterprise and provides theoretical and methodological support for intelligent inspection of product surface quality. By standardizing the control process of pharmaceutical manufacturing and improving the management capability of the manufacturing process, our approach holds significant market application prospects.