Generative Adversarial Network Applications in Industry 4.0: A Review

The breakthrough brought by generative adversarial networks (GANs) in computer vision (CV) applications has gained a lot of attention in different fields due to their ability to capture the distribution of a dataset and generate high-quality similar images. From one side, this technology has been rapidly adopted as an alternative to traditional applications and introduced novel perspectives in data augmentation, domain transfer, image expansion, image restoration, image segmentation, and super-resolution. From another side, we found that due to the lack of industrial datasets and the limitation for acquiring and accurately annotating new images, GANs form an exciting solution to generate new industrial image datasets or to restore and augment existing ones. Therefore, we introduce a review of the latest trend in GANs applications and project them in industrial use cases. We conducted our experiments with synthetic images and analyzed most of GAN’s failures and image artifacts to provide training’s best practices.