NN’s tend to learn most of non-linear transformations, so generally (with the right amount of epochs and data) they should be able to learn most of the ones used in image processing. But I agree that, from an empirical point of view, one should expect things like sharpening, etc, should help the model on detecting scratches more easily.
Another thing to note is that most of us are using pre-trained models, so surely there is something to tell about how much that affects on using this kind of pre-processing we are talking about.
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