Enhancing Glass Defect Detection with Diffusion Models: Addressing Imbalanced Datasets in Manufacturing Quality Control

Visual defect detection in industrial glass manufacturing remains a critical challenge due to the low frequency of defective products, leading to imbalanced datasets that limit the performance of deep learning models and computer vision systems. This paper presents a novel approach using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) to generate synthetic defective glass product images for data augmentation, effectively addressing class imbalance issues in manufacturing quality control and automated visual inspection. The methodology significantly enhances image classification performance of standard CNN architectures (ResNet50V2, EfficientNetB0, and MobileNetV2) in detecting anomalies by increasing the minority class representation. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in key machine learning metrics, particularly in recall for defective samples across all tested deep neural network architectures while maintaining perfect precision on the validation set. The most dramatic improvement was observed in ResNet50V2's overall classification accuracy, which increased from 78% to 93% when trained with the augmented data. This work provides a scalable, cost-effective approach to enhancing automated defect detection in glass manufacturing that can potentially be extended to other industrial quality assurance systems and industries with similar class imbalance challenges.