In semiconductor manufacturing, the wafer dicing process is central yet vulnerable to defects that significantly impair yield - the proportion of defect-free chips. Deep neural networks are the current state of the art in (semi-)automated visual inspection. However, they are notoriously known to require a particularly large amount of data for model training. To address these challenges, we explore the application of generative adversarial networks (GAN) for image data augmentation and classification of semiconductor wafer dicing induced defects to enhance the variety and balance of training data for visual inspection systems. With this approach, synthetic yet realistic images are generated that mimic real-world dicing defects. We employ three different GAN variants for high-resolution image synthesis: Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN), CycleGAN, and StyleGAN3. Our work-in-progress results demonstrate that improved classification accuracies can be obtained, showing an average improvement of up to 23.1 % from 65.1 % (baseline experiment) to 88.2 % (DCGAN experiment) in balanced accuracy, which may enable yield optimization in production.

In medical imaging, access to data is commonly limited due to patient privacy restrictions and the issue that it can be difficult to acquire enough data in the case of rare diseases.[1] The purpose of this investigation was to develop a reusable open-source synthetic image generation pipeline, the GAN Image Synthesis Tool (GIST), that is easy to use as well as easy to deploy. The pipeline helps to improve and standardize AI algorithms in the digital health space by generating high quality synthetic image data that is not linked to specific patients. Its image generation capabilities include the ability to generate imaging of pathologies or injuries with low incidence rates. This improvement of digital health AI algorithms could improve diagnostic accuracy, aid in patient care, decrease medicolegal claims, and ultimately decrease the overall cost of healthcare. The pipeline builds on existing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) algorithms, and preprocessing and evaluation steps were included for completeness. For this work, we focused on ensuring the pipeline supports radiography, with a focus on synthetic knee and elbow x-ray images. In designing the pipeline, we evaluated the performance of current GAN architectures, studying the performance on available x-ray data. We show that the pipeline is capable of generating high quality and clinically relevant images based on a lay person's evaluation and the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) metric.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been widely investigated for image synthesis based on their powerful representation learning ability. In this work, we explore the StyleGAN and its application of synthetic food image generation. Despite the impressive performance of GAN for natural image generation, food images suffer from high intra-class diversity and inter-class similarity, resulting in overfitting and visual artifacts for synthetic images. Therefore, we aim to explore the capability and improve the performance of GAN methods for food image generation. Specifically, we first choose StyleGAN3 as the baseline method to generate synthetic food images and analyze the performance. Then, we identify two issues that can cause performance degradation on food images during the training phase: (1) inter-class feature entanglement during multi-food classes training and (2) loss of high-resolution detail during image downsampling. To address both issues, we propose to train one food category at a time to avoid feature entanglement and leverage image patches cropped from high-resolution datasets to retain fine details. We evaluate our method on the Food-101 dataset and show improved quality of generated synthetic food images compared with the baseline. Finally, we demonstrate the great potential of improving the performance of downstream tasks, such as food image classification by including high-quality synthetic training samples in the data augmentation.

StyleGAN-XL: SOTA in neural image synthesis StyleGAN sets new standards for generative modeling but performance severely degrades on unstructured datasets (ImageNet). Researcher from Tübingen unveil StyleGAN-XL, new SOTA for large diverse dataset?

The recent advances in the quality and resolution of Generative adversarial networks (GAN) have seen a rapid improvement. These techniques are used for various applications, including image editing, domain translation, or video generation, to name just some examples. While several ways to control GANs' generative process have been found, there is still not much known about their synthesis abilities. In 2019, Nvidia launched its second version of StyleGAN by fixing artifacts features and further improving generated images' quality. StyleGAN being the first of its type image generation method to generate very real images was open-sourced in February 2019.