Intelligent Aircraft Damage Detection: Transfer Learning Practice with VGG16 and BLIP

This project proposes an automatic aircraft damage detection solution combining VGG16 Convolutional Neural Network and BLIP Vision-Language Model. It achieves damage classification and natural language description generation via transfer learning, aiming to provide an intelligent auxiliary tool for aviation maintenance and address the pain points of traditional manual inspection.

Daily maintenance of aircraft is crucial for flight safety, but traditional manual inspection has problems such as high intensity, long time consumption, and easy missed detection; human error is one of the causes of accidents. Although automated detection is feasible, it faces challenges like diverse damage types, complex backgrounds, and scarcity of high-quality annotated data, requiring both high-precision classification and understandable description capabilities.

A two-stage design is adopted:

1. Damage Classification (VGG16) : Based on the ImageNet pre-trained model, freeze the first 10 convolutional layers, fine-tune the last 6 layers and fully connected layers to achieve binary classification of damaged/intact;
2. Damage Description (BLIP) : Use the pre-trained BLIP model, perform instruction fine-tuning with the aircraft damage description dataset to generate natural language reports; The transfer learning strategy solves the problem of data scarcity. Data preprocessing includes size normalization, augmentation, region cropping, etc. Model integration uses a cascaded process to save resources.

1. Dual-Model Collaboration: Classification and description are decoupled, allowing separate optimization and upgrading;
2. Domain-Adaptive Transfer: Reasonably freeze and fine-tune general models to adapt to vertical domains;
3. Interpretability: Natural language descriptions generated by BLIP provide details such as damage location and morphology, assisting maintenance decision-making.

Current Limitations: Simplified binary classification, insufficient description granularity, dependence on data quality; Improvement Directions: Expand to multi-classification, integrate object detection and localization, train domain-specific BLIP, fuse multi-modal data such as infrared/ultrasound.

Application scenarios include daily inspection assistance, post-accident assessment, training and teaching, data accumulation; industrial value lies in reducing maintenance costs, improving efficiency, reducing human errors, and ultimately ensuring flight safety.

This project demonstrates the application paradigm of transfer learning in industrial vision detection. The VGG16+BLIP combination is mature, stable, and easy to deploy, and can be used as a baseline solution. It provides a clear technical route reference for industrial AI developers, and the core idea of transfer learning + domain fine-tuning will still be applicable to future development.