Low Cost Two-Stage Fabric Defect Detection at the Edge

Fabric inspection in the garment industries of low-income economies remains largely manual, and commercial vision systems are priced beyond most small and medium mills. Because defects are sparse under controlled production, a natural response is a cascade: screen every frame with a cheap anomaly detector and invoke a full detector only on suspicious frames. We build such a cascade for four knit-fabric defect classes and deploy it end-to-end on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with TensorRT FP16. Stage 1 is a compact convolutional autoencoder with decoder attention gates, an edge-weighted reconstruction loss, and feature-level distillation from a frozen YOLOv5n teacher; Stage 2 is YOLOv5n, invoked only on flagged frames. On a 249-image benchmark disjoint from detector training (20 defective, 229 non-defective), Stage 1 at a recall-prioritised threshold flags all 20 defective images (95% CI 0.83-1.00) at a false-positive rate of 49.3% (113/229), reducing false positives by 19.3% relative to a plain autoencoder (p=0.011). The parallel pipeline reaches 13.45 FPS against 9.86 FPS for a sequential YOLO-only loop. Our central finding comes from decomposing that 1.36x: 91% of it is attributable to overlapping JPEG decode with inference rather than to the cascade, which contributes only a 5.1% inference reduction at the measured forwarding rate p = 0.534. We further show that forwarding here is false-positive-limited rather than prevalence-limited - 85% of forwarded frames are false alarms - and quantify the 29-45% inference reduction attainable under tighter calibration. We report this as a caution for cascade speedups measured without controlling the data path, and position the system as AI-assisted triage rather than autonomous acceptance.