Abstract
Few-shot defect detection holds significant importance for adapting to complex industrial environments and enhancing detection accuracy. Addressing the issue where existing few-shot defect detection methods are prone to compromised feature representation under varying defect scales, this study proposes a distance-guided prototype network (DGPN) with explicit meta learning. Building upon the prototype network, our method leverages distance information between normal and anomalous image features to guide feature transformation and fusion processes. An attention gating block (AGB) is introduced to convert distance representation vectors into feature maps while enhancing the capture capability for fine-grained targets. A multiscale feature fusion module (MSFF) is proposed to further strengthen the network’s ability to extract multiscale features and semantic information. Additionally, an upsample fusion module (UF) is designed to fully integrate and exchange multiscale contextual information between shallow and deep layers, decoding semantic information and spatial details to improve the precision of small defect detection. Extensive experiments on Industrial-5i, Visa, and a self-built chip dataset validate the superiority of the proposed method and the practical applicability.
















Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2024YFF0504904), Key Research and Development Plan Program of Hunan Province (Grant No. 2023GK2021), and the Project of State Key Laboratory of Precision Manufacturing for Extreme Service Performance of Central South University (Grant No. ZZYJKT2024-09).
Funding
National Key R & D Program of China,2024YFF0504904, Ji’an Duan, Key R & D Plan Program of Hunan Province, 2023GK2021, Yuqian Zhao, Project of State Key Laboratory of Precision Manufacturing for Extreme Service Performance of Central South University,ZZYJKT2024-09, Fan Zhang.
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Zhang, F., Gong, L., Zhao, Y. et al. Distance-guided prototype network for few-shot vision-based industrial defect detection. J Intell Manuf (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-026-02960-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-026-02960-x