SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATED SURFACE ASSESSMENT

Embodiments described herein provide a system for assessing the surface of an object for detecting contamination or other defects. During operation, the system obtains an input image indicating the contamination on the object and generates a synthetic image using an artificial intelligence (AI) model based on the input image. The synthetic image can indicate the object without the contamination. The system then determines a difference between the input image and the synthetic image to identify an image area corresponding to the contamination. Subsequently, the system generates a contamination map of the contamination by highlighting the image area based on one or more image enhancement operations.