Abstract
In industrial machine vision, images captured by edge devices are often downsampled and compressed to reduce bandwidth, introducing resolution loss and compression artifacts that severely degrade the performance of downstream tasks, such as defect detection. Existing quality enhancement methods typically apply super-resolution (SR) or compression artifact removal (CAR) independently or in a sequential manner and are largely optimized for human visual fidelity rather than machine perception.
This paper proposes an end-to-end quality enhancement framework that integrates SR and CAR with a unified training strategy that optimizes both human-perception and machine-perception objectives. We investigate fixed-weight and uncertainty-based dynamic-weight loss functions to balance reconstruction quality and machine vision task performance.
Extensive experiments on PCB Defect, DeepPCB, and NEU-DET datasets show that the proposed jointly trained model generally outperforms standalone and separately trained SR-CAR pipelines. In particular, under severe JPEG compression, our method improves defect detection performance from 0.461 to 0.887 mAP@50 on PCB Defect over sequential SR-CAR baselines, with only a slight reduction in PSNR.
These results demonstrate that joint optimization is critical for compression-aware industrial machine vision systems.