Machine learning detect changes in components

Defect Detection and Failure Detection/Predictive Maintenance are two areas of modern manufacturing and engineering where machine learning can provide substantial and even radical solutions.

For example, intelligent systems may detect defects at an early stage with enough accuracy and generality so as to save both costs and increase reliability.

On the other hand, intelligent systems may monitor operation logs of systems (eg an aircraft) and predict component failure exactly when needed with accuracy and generality so as to reduce downtime, save costs and increase safety.

Both these approaches require sophisticated learning methods (ie machine, deep, learning) so as to handle complexity and at the same time be general enough and accurate enough for practical purposes.

Sample references:

1. AI-Based Visual Inspection For Defect Detection
2. Study on Machine Learning Based Intelligent Defect Detection System
3. How to Find the Right Machine Learning Techniques for Predictive Maintenance?
4. Machine Learning Techniques for Predictive Maintenance

This is an interesting question about how machine learning can be used to changes in components. In this case, I am going to infer that is maybe talking about detecting defect components, which of course should not be put into a new vehicle.

In this case, you might use images (maybe taken from video of the assembly floor) to the detect potentially defect components. So, hard-coding this would be extremely hard, because:

1. Firstly, you would need to the code to detect the component and separate this from the background (this task is known as semantic segmentation).
2. You then have to compare the component with images of a "good" component and a "bad" component (preferably multiple examples of each). This also isn't an easy task to hard-code, because you need might observe the component in different angles (bird's eye view or front on, or example), which are not discrete. Therefore, some level of generalisation is required to do this (hence machine learning)

I look forward to other's interpretations and answers to this question.