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Steel-manufacturing sites are extremely harsh and dangerous environments. Visibility is reduced by dust, water vapor, oil, and low light conditions. Additionally, the steel products from hot furnaces have surface temperatures ranging from 1200 to 800 degrees celsius and weigh several to tens of tons. It is extremely dangerous for humans to visually inspect these steel products in such environments. Therefore, the use of automatic inspection equipment for steel surfaces is essential. Initially, image-processing methods were used, but with recent advances in deep learning, deep-learning-based methods are also being applied in this field. However, the method currently widely used involves utilizing existing models through transfer learning, which inevitably causes curvature of the input image data and limits performance. Furthermore, previous studies have focused on 2D sheet metal products, and there has been no research on three-dimensional geometric products. In this study, we propose dataset generation through geometric transformations that parameterize the structure of the steel surface defect detector hardware, along with a performance-based model optimization algorithm. In validation experiments, an average F1 score of 0.932 and an average area under curve of 0.99 were obtained, implying that the proposed algorithm has near-ideal performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When detecting surface defects in a complex industrial cutting environment, the defects are easily polluted and covered by interfering factors (chips or coolant residues). The defect of the surface images with interference factors is a novel problem in the existing studies, and it is also a difficulty in the detection field. Hence, this paper proposes a high-precision anti-interference detection method for surface defects under the influence of complex environment. The detection method provides a new research idea, which is divided into three main processes: interference regions location, interference regions repair, defect detection. The regions affected by interference factors are adaptively located through the proposed Efficient Channel Attention Network (ECANet)-DeeplabV3 + network model. The mean Pixel Accuracy (mPA) and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of ECANet-DeeplabV3 + network model for interference factor identification are 98.37% and 95.46%, respectively. The Criminisi algorithm is improved from priority, finding the best matching block, and searching regions. Directional repair based on the improved Criminisi algorithm is performed on the identified interfering regions removing the interfering factors in the image, which is the research core. Then, defect detection is performed on the repaired image using the improved superpixel technology. At the same time, the defect detection results provide a variety of surface defect information for the cutting staff, including defect types, the number of pixels in different defect regions, and the area ratio of different defect regions. This information improves predictive maintenance and surface quality control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of surface defects on metals plays a pivotal role in the evaluation of aluminum profile product quality. To date, the most prevalent approach for detecting metal surface defects is via the use of conventional neural networks (CNNs). However, in recent years, transformer-based methods have achieved notable improvements in computer vision and exhibited superiority over traditional CNNs in most tasks. Regarding aluminum surface defect image characteristics, such as intricate textures, few defect samples, and large-scale differences in various defects, it is difficult to further improve the performance of traditional CNNs. Hence, this study proposes a novel variant transformer-based method for aluminum profile surface defect detection that combines a traditional CNN and transformer architecture with a deformable attention module (DAM). The DAM focuses on a subset of the critical sampling points around the reference point to alleviate the intractable complexity associated with high-resolution feature maps and enhances the recognition effect of small target defects. The proposed image-stitching method uses defect-free samples to generate new samples, which partially mitigates the issue of class imbalance. Moreover, we performed supplementary experiments to confirm the effectiveness of transfer learning in training small-scale datasets. Compared with a baseline, the mean average precision (mAP) improved by 3.32%. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method in accurately detecting surface defects in aluminum profiles and significantly improving the detection of small target defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the evolving Industry 4.0 landscape, machine learning-based visual inspection plays a key role in enhancing production efficiency. Screen printing, a versatile and cost-effective manufacturing technique, is widely applied in industries like electronics, textiles, and automotive. However, the production of complex multilayered designs is error-prone, resulting in a variety of defect appearances and classes. These defects can be characterized as small in relation to large sample areas and weakly pronounced. Sufficient defect visualization and robust defect detection methods are essential to address these challenges, especially considering the permitted design variability. In this work, we present a novel automatic visual inspection system for surface defect detection on decorated foil plates. Customized optical modalities, integrated into a sequential inspection procedure, enable defect visualization of production-related defect classes. The introduced patch-wise defect detection methods, designed to leverage less labeled data, prove effective for industrial defect detection, meeting the given process requirements. In this context, we propose an industry-applicable and scalable data preprocessing workflow that minimizes the overall labeling effort while maintaining high detection performance, as known in supervised settings. Moreover, the presented methods, not relying on any labeled defective training data, outperformed a state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection method in terms of defect detection performance and inference speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To accurately detect defects, we propose an enhanced model based on YOLOv8, named STE-YOLO. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper adopts YOLOv8 as the improved model. The structure of this paper is as follows: We enhance the model's feature extraction and small detail recognition by integrating GhostConv into partial convolutions. In order to address the attention bias of the model, we introduce a Bottleneck Transformer self-attention convolution layer that effectively improves localization box accuracy. For the problem of defect category mismatches, we exploit the C2f-LSKA attention mechanism in the model head to address this issue. The experimental results indicate that the improved model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 79.0%, compared to 65.8% for the original model, marking an improvement of 13.1%. STE-YOLO significantly increases the precision of detecting surface defects on strip steel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an enhanced Faster R-CNN model for detecting surface defects in resistance welding spots, improving both efficiency and accuracy for body-in-white quality monitoring. Key innovations include using high-confidence anchor boxes from the RPN network to locate welding spots, using the SmoothL1 loss function, and applying Fast R-CNN to classify detected defects. Additionally, a new pruning model is introduced, reducing unnecessary layers and parameters in the neural network, leading to faster processing times without sacrificing accuracy. Tests show that the model achieves over 90% accuracy and recall, processing each image in about 15 ms, meeting industrial requirements for welding spot inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leather has played a very important role in human life for thousands of years. Ensuring the quality of leather and addressing surface defects poses significant challenges. Traditionally, human inspectors are responsible for detecting surface defects in tanneries, but this approach is labor-intensive and susceptible to human error. As a result, there is a growing demand for automated systems to detect the defects. Herein, artificial intelligence (AI) was developed to detect the defects on leather surfaces. Six targeted defect types, denoted as insect bites, scratches, holes, stitch marks, diseased and ruptures, were specifically addressed to enhance the overall quality assessment process. AI-based vision techniques were used to detect flaws on the leather on photographs taken with a high-resolution camera. Deep learning algorithms Mask R-CNN, YOLOv8 and within the framework of Detectron2, RetinaNet R101 3x, Faster R-CNN R101-FPN 3x models were performed and a comparison was made between these algorithms. By using the slicing aided hyper-inference (SAHI) algorithm in coordination with these algorithms, the detection rates of small defects on the images were increased. The highest accuracy rate was achieved when the YOLOv8 algorithm had 75 epoch values for training, and the SAHI algorithm had slice height-width values of 256 × 256 pixels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the limitations of existing deep learning-based algorithms in detecting surface defects on brake pipe ends, a novel lightweight detection algorithm, FP-YOLOv8, is proposed. This algorithm is developed based on the YOLOv8n framework with the aim of improving accuracy and model lightweight design. First, the C2f_GhostV2 module has been designed to replace the original C2f module. It reduces the model's parameter count through its unique design. It achieves improved feature representation by adopting specific technique within its structure. Additionally, it incorporates the decoupled fully connected (DFC) attention mechanism, which minimizes information loss during long-range feature transmission by separately capturing pixel information along horizontal and vertical axes via convolution. Second, the Dynamic ATSS label allocation strategy is applied, which dynamically adjusts label assignments by integrating Anchor IoUs and predicted IoUs, effectively reducing the misclassification of high-quality prediction samples as negative samples. Thus, it improves the detection accuracy of the model. Lastly, an asymmetric small-target detection head, FADH, is proposed to utilize depth-separable convolution to accomplish classification and regression tasks, enabling more precise capture of detailed information across scales and improving the detection of small-target defects. The experimental results show that FP-YOLOv8 achieves a mAP50 of 89.5% and an F1-score of 87% on the ends surface defects dataset, representing improvements of 3.3% and 6.0%, respectively, over the YOLOv8n algorithm, Meanwhile, it reduces model parameters and computational costs by 14.3% and 21.0%. Additionally, compared to the baseline model, the AP50 values for cracks, scratches, and flash defects rise by 5.5%, 5.6%, and 2.3%, respectively. These results validate the efficacy of FP-YOLOv8 in enhancing defect detection accuracy, reducing missed detection rates, and decreasing model parameter counts and computational demands, thus meeting the requirements of online defect detection for brake pipe ends surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although approaches for the online surface detection of automotive pipelines exist, low defect area rates, small-sample and long-tailed data, and the difficulty of detection due to the variable morphology of defects are three major problems faced when using such methods. In order to solve these problems, this study combines traditional visual detection methods and deep neural network technology to propose a transfer learning multi-channel fusion decision network without significantly increasing the number of network layers or the structural complexity. Each channel of the network is designed according to the characteristics of different types of defects. Dynamic weights are assigned to achieve decision-level fusion through the use of a matrix of indicators to evaluate the performance of each channel's recognition ability. In order to improve the detection efficiency and reduce the amount of data transmission and processing, an improved ROI detection algorithm for surface defects is proposed. It can enable the rapid screening of target surfaces for the high-quality and rapid acquisition of surface defect images. On an automotive pipeline surface defect dataset, the detection accuracy of the multi-channel fusion decision network with transfer learning was 97.78% and its detection speed was 153.8 FPS. The experimental results indicate that the multi-channel fusion decision network could simultaneously take into account the needs for real-time detection and accuracy, synthesize the advantages of different network structures, and avoid the limitations of single-channel networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we propose a reparameterization You-Only-Look-Once v5 (YOLOv5) algorithm model for strip-steel surface defect detection to address low precision and poor timeliness in traditional methods. The proposed model introduces a re-parameterized VGG Light module, an enhanced bidirectional feature pyramid network feature structure, and a bounding box regression loss function fused with a normalized Gaussian-Wasserstein distance metric to improve small-target-defect detection accuracy. The experimental findings reveal a mean average precision (mAP) of 82.1% on the NEU-DET dataset, representing a notable improvement of 4.1% over the baseline YOLOv5s algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm model demonstrates superior detection accuracy compared with other prevalent object detection models and effectively mitigates challenges such as false detections and missed detections of small targets. Notably, it achieves an impressive detection speed of 68 FPS, affirming its efficacy in real-time applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional industrial surface defect detection method often employs CCD/CMOS cameras, but they are unable to detect the minute defects on aluminum substrates in highly dynamic industrial scenes due to their nature. Event camera is a novel high-resolution vision sensor that measures per-pixel brightness changes in an asynchronous manner and outputs as event information flow (EIF). Small and weak defects on aluminum substrate can be captured by event camera effectively, but the EIF contains a large amount of noise, making it difficult to perform accurate and high-precision defect detection. To address this problem, we propose a frame aggregation method to realize good event information flow processing, and then use an improved circle detection method to locate the aluminum substrate in each frame, removing abundant event information outside the aluminum substrate. Subsequently, we enhance the event signals under different frames based on optical flow tracking using multiple features, and construct a semi-supervised detector based on pseudo-labels to achieve high-precision defect localization. Finally, considering the small inter-class differences in defects on the surface of aluminum substrates, we construct a defect class corrector based on ensemble learning to enhance the ability to determine defect classes, achieving high-precision automatic quality inspection of aluminum substrate surfaces. The performance of our method is compared with other advanced methods based on event camera data of aluminum substrates in real industrial scenarios. The experimental results show that our method has improved the detection accuracy by ∼10% and the classification accuracy by ∼25% compared to the original state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Machine Tool & Hydraulics is the property of Guangzhou Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (GMERI) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Compared to the surface defect detection of industrial products produced according to specified processes, the detection of surface defects in naturally grown red jujubes poses unique and significant challenges for researchers. The high diversity of surface defects, subtle distinctions from the background, low contrast, varying scales, and the presence of high levels of noise in images are among the factors that greatly amplify the complexity of defect detection tasks. Existing methods show some deficiencies in addressing these issues, mainly due to insufficient feature extraction capabilities and overly complex network structures, leading to limitations in model efficiency and practical application performance. To tackle the challenges associated with red jujube surface defect detection, this study proposes an optimized Tiny Vision Transformer (TinyViT) network structure, named RJ-TinyViT. This method refines the TinyViT-5 m network structure to reduce network burden and introduces an improved Multi-Kernel Block (MK Block) and an improved Mobile Inverted Bottleneck Convolution Block (MBConv Block) to enhance feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, we have integrated the Coordinate Attention (CA) module to enhance the model's capacity for recognizing and focusing on features of surface defects on red jujubes. Experimental results show that RJ-TinyViT achieved a classification accuracy of 93.38%, marking an improvement of 1.84% over the original TinyViT network. At the same time, its Floating-point Operations (FLOPs) and Parameters (Params) were reduced to 58.97% and 39.84% of the original TinyViT network, respectively. These results not only demonstrate that RJ-TinyViT achieves model lightweighting while maintaining high accuracy but also highlight its value in practical industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The segmentation of surface defects in lithium batteries is crucial for enhancing the overall quality of the production process. However, the severe foreground–background imbalance in surface images of lithium batteries, along with the irregular shapes and random distribution of foreground regions, poses significant challenges for defect segmentation. Based on these observations, this paper focuses on the separation of foreground and background in surface defect images of lithium batteries and proposes a novel Mask Space Optimization Transformer (MSOFormer) for semantic segmentation of these images. Specifically, the Mask Boundary Loss (MBL) module in our model provides more efficient supervision during training to enhance the accuracy of the mask computation within the mask attention mechanism, thereby improving the model's performance in separating foreground and background. Additionally, the Dynamic Spatial Query (DSQ) module allocates spatial information of the image to each query, enhancing the model's sensitivity to the positions of small foreground targets in various scenes. The Efficient Pixel Decoder (EPD) ensures deformable receptive fields for irregularly shaped foregrounds while further improving the model's performance and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). Specifically, our approach achieves an mIoU of 84.18% on the lithium battery surface defect test set and 85.53% and 87.05% mIoUs on two publicly available defect test sets with similar defect characteristics to lithium batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strip steel is extensively utilized in industries such as automotive manufacturing and aerospace due to its superior machinability, economic benefits, and adaptability. However, defects on the surface of steel strips, such as inclusions, patches, and scratches, significantly affect the performance and service life of the product. Therefore, the salient object detection of surface defects on strip steel is crucial to ensure the quality of the final product. Many factors, such as the low contrast of surface defects on strip steel, the diversity of defect types, complex texture structures, and irregular defect distribution, hinder existing detection technologies from accurately identifying and segmenting defect areas against complex backgrounds. To address the above problems, we propose a novel detector called S3D-SOD for the salient object detection of strip steel surface defects. For the encoding stage, a residual self-attention block is proposed to explore semantic information cues of high-level features to locate and guide low-level feature information. In addition, we apply a general residual channel and spatial attention to low-level features, enabling the model to adaptively focus on the key channels and spatial areas of feature maps with high resolutions, thereby enhancing the encoder features and accelerating the convergence of the model. For the decoding stage, a simple residual decoder block with an upsampling operation is proposed to realize the integration and interaction of feature information between different layers. Here, the simple residual decoder block is used for feature integration due to the following observation: backbone networks like ResNet and the Swin Transformer, after being pretrained on the large dataset ImageNet and then fine-tuned on a smaller dataset for strip steel surface defects, are capable of extracting feature maps that contain both general image features and the specific characteristics required for the salient object detection of strip steel surface defects. The experimental results on the SD-saliency-900 dataset show that S3D-SOD is better than advanced methods, and it has strong generalization ability and robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Chongqing University of Technology (Natural Science) is the property of Chongqing University of Technology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Steel, as a crucial material extensively used in various fields, has a critical impact on the determination of the stability and reliability of engineering structures. Nevertheless, because of inevitable factors in manufacturing, transportation, and other processes, steel may exhibit various surface defects during production and handling. To address these defects, the investigation puts forward a resilient machine-learning method for steel surface defect detection based on lightweight convolution. First, to reduce redundant features, complexity, and computational cost, the Spatial and Channel Reconstruction Convolution (ScConv) module is added before the Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast (SPPF) within the YOLOv8n's backbone network. Second, in the Neck layer, lightweight convolution GSConv is used to replace the convolutional modules, and the efficient cross-stage partial network (CSP) module, VoV-GSCSP is substituted for the C2f module to alleviate the model burden while maintaining accuracy. Then, to focus on important information related to the current task, the Coordinate Attention module is added to the Neck layer. Finally, the activation function of YOLOv8n has been swapped for the Leaky Rectified Linear Unit (LeakyReLU) to effectively address issues such as gradient vanishing and overfitting. The method achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 77.7% on the NEU-DET dataset, which is an improvement of 4.7% over the original YOLOv8n. Additionally, the frames per second (FPS) reached 17.36 f/s, representing a 5.79 f/s increase compared to the original YOLOv8n. On the GC10-DET dataset, mAP improves by 5.5%, with a FPS of 15.63 f/s. A plethora of experimentation on both datasets illustrates the method's robustness, meeting the precision criteria for detecting metal defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection of hot-rolled steel strip is a crucial process in its production. Aiming at the problem of poor detection accuracy caused by complex shape of defect features and imbalance between object scale and feature scale, this paper proposes a multi-scale sensing and multi-dimensional feature enhancement algorithm. Firstly, a multi-branch residual aggregation module (MRAM) is proposed, which uses the interactive features of different receptive fields between layers to capture global and local texture features, improving the feature extraction capability for defects of different scales. Then, the multi-dimensional attention enhancement head (MAEH) is proposed, which integrates feature information from different prediction branches and realises feature information enhancement in scale, space and channel dimensions for the aggregated information to improve the accuracy and robustness of steel surface defect detection. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 82.7% mAP and 89 FPS on the NEU-DET dataset, and 73.3% mAP and 94 FPS on the GC10-DET dataset. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm has the highest mAP, strong generalisation ability, and good real-time performance, which proves its effectiveness in detecting hot-rolled steel strip surface defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In industrial manufacturing, metal surface defect detection often suffers from low detection accuracy, high leakage rates, and false detection rates. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel model named DSL-YOLO for metal surface defect detection. First, we introduce the C2f_DWRB structure by integrating the DWRB module with C2f, enhancing the model's ability to detect small and occluded targets and effectively extract sparse spatial features. Second, we design the SADown module to improve feature extraction in challenging tasks involving blurred images or very small objects. Finally, to further enhance the model's capacity to extract multi-scale features and capture critical image information (such as edges, textures, and shapes) without significantly increasing memory usage and computational cost, we propose the LASPPF structure. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved model achieves significant performance gains on both the GC10-DET and NEU-DET datasets, with a mAP@0.5 increase of 4.2% and 2.6%, respectively. The improvements in detection accuracy highlight the model's ability to address common challenges while maintaining efficiency and feasibility in metal surface defect detection, providing a valuable solution for industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laser directed energy deposition (LDED), a class of additive manufacturing (AM) processes, has immense potential to be used for various engineering applications to build components with medium to high complexity. However, dimensional deviations from intended values and inadequate surface quality of the built parts limit its wide deployment. The present work reports the development of an adaptive tool path trajectory platform to correct the dimensional inaccuracies in-situ to build high-quality components using LDED. The study deploys a laser line scanner to scan the part after the deposition of the definite number of layers followed by the detection of concave, convex, and flat surfaces using deep learning. Further, a novel adaptive trajectory planning algorithm is deployed by using three different strategies to control material deposition on concave, convex, and flat surfaces. The material deposition is controlled by using adaptive scanning speed control (ASSC), and a combination of laser on–off and scanning speed control (ASSLC). Subsequently, the built geometries are subjected to geometric, microstructure, and mechanical characterizations. It is observed that the deviation of the part was reduced by 30%, and 27.5% using ASSC and ASSLC, respectively. The structures built using the three strategies show some micropores at isolated locations. The microstructure is mainly cellular under all conditions with a similar average microhardness of ~ 210 HV. The study provides an integrated and comprehensive approach for building high-quality large-scale components using LDED with minimal dimensional deviation from the original CAD model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Packaging & Food Machinery is the property of Packaging & Food Machinery Magazine and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The YOLOv8 model has high detection efficiency and classification accuracy in detecting commutator surface defects, aimed at the problem of low working efficiency of a commutator, caused by commutator surface defects. First, the theoretical framework of Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN), spatial pyramid pooling (SPP)-net, Fast R-CNN, and Faster R-CNN is introduced, and the detection principle and process are described in detail. Secondly, the principle of the YOLOv8 network structure, head structure, neck structure, and C2f module are explained, and the loss function is described. The average precision of the proposed algorithm for detecting cracks and small points is more than 98%, and the frames per second (FPS) is 27. The detection results are mapped to the original image, and the visualization of the commutator surface defect detection is obtained, which has a higher robustness, accuracy, and real-time performance than the R-CNN, SPP-net, Fast R-CNN, and Faster R-CNN algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents Fix-YOLOX (Fixmatch-You Only Look Once X), a semisupervised target detection model that uses a small amount of annotated data for fully supervised training, and adds a semisupervised training module using both pseudolabelling and consistent regularization to prevent overfitting in fully supervised training by using unlabelled data. Additionally, the generalization of the model and its fault tolerance to labelled data are improved. The experimental results show that the proposed semisupervised visual detection algorithm, Fix-YOLOX, can substantially reduce the amount of data annotation required for the target detection task while effectively overcoming the problem caused by annotated data with uneven quality. The YOLOX model achieves 91.95% accuracy with 50% annotated data and an average detection time of 10.4 ms per image/frame, which is consistent with the detection time of original YOLOX. Therefore, the model has good real-time performance and generalizability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technology into student training programs is strategically crucial for developing future professionals with both forward-thinking capabilities and practical skills. This paper uses steel surface defect detection as a case study to propose a simulation-based teaching method grounded in deep learning. The method encompasses the entire process from data preprocessing and model training to validation analysis and innovation optimization with the goal of deepening students' understanding of AI technology and enhancing their ability to apply it to real-world scenarios. We have designed an experimental framework that incorporates the Efficient Multi-Scale Attention (EMA) mechanism into the Backbone network. This approach helps students understand the principles of feature extraction and the core functions of attention mechanisms. Additionally, we introduced a novel architecture—Convolution 3 Dilated Convolution X (C3DX)—into the Neck network. This architecture effectively expands the network's receptive field, improves its ability to capture multi-scale information, and thus enhances defect detection accuracy. Furthermore, the implementation of the Efficient Intersection over Union (EIoU) loss function optimizes the bounding box predictions, further increasing the model's accuracy and robustness. Overall, the teaching design not only ensures that the content remains at the cutting edge of technology but also emphasizes its practicality and operability. This approach enables students to effectively apply theoretical knowledge to real-world engineering projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strip steel serves as a crucial raw material in numerous industries, including aircraft and automobile manufacturing. Surface defects in strip steel can degrade the performance, quality, and appearance of industrial steel products. Detecting surface defects in steel strip products is challenging due to the low contrast between defects and background, small defect targets, as well as significant variations in defect sizes. To address these challenges, a two-stage attention-based feature-enhancement network (TAFENet) is proposed, wherein the first-stage feature-enhancement procedure utilizes an attentional convolutional fusion module with convolution to combine all four-level features and then strengthens the features of different levels via a residual spatial-channel attention connection module (RSC). The second-stage feature-enhancement procedure combines three-level features using an attentional self-attention fusion module and then strengthens the features using a RSC attention module. Experiments on the NEU-DET and GC10-DET datasets demonstrated that the proposed method significantly improved detection accuracy, thereby confirming the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the scarcity of defect samples in industrial applications, this paper proposed a method for segmenting surface defects in metal workpieces with only a minimal number of required defect samples. The method combined image generation techniques with a semi-supervised learning strategy. It utilized small-sized defect patches, and extracted from a minimal number of defect images to train a defect generation model. Subsequently, the method integrated these generated defect images into normal images to facilitate data augmentation. Additionally, the method applied a semi-supervised learning strategy to train the segmentation network, aiming to mitigate the adverse effects of differences between generated and real data distributions. The experimental phase involved conducting tests on a real-world computer vision detection system for metal workpieces. The results demonstrate that the semi-supervised training strategy significantly enhances the segmentation model's generalization ability to real defects. The method achieves high segmentation accuracy using only five defect sample images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect inspection methods have proven effective in addressing casting quality control tasks. However, traditional inspection methods often struggle to achieve high-precision detection of surface defects in castings with similar characteristics and minor scales. The study introduces DES-YOLO, a novel real-time method for detecting castings' surface defects. In the DES-YOLO model, we incorporate the DSC-Darknet backbone network and global attention mechanism (GAM) module to enhance the identification of defect target features. These additions are essential for overcoming the challenge posed by the high similarity among defect characteristics, such as shrinkage holes and slag holes, which can result in decreased detection accuracy. An enhanced pyramid pooling module is also introduced to improve feature representation for small defective parts through multi-layer pooling. We integrate Slim-Neck and SIoU bounding box regression loss functions for real-time detection in actual production scenarios. These functions reduce memory overhead and enable real-time detection of surface defects in castings. Experimental findings demonstrate that the DES-YOLO model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.6% on the CSD-DET dataset and a single-image inference speed of 3.9 milliseconds. The proposed method proves capable of swiftly and accurately accomplishing real-time detection of surface defects in castings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problems of the poor robustness and universality of traditional contour matching algorithms in engineering applications, a method for improving the surface defect detection of industrial products based on contour matching algorithms is detailed in this paper. Based on the image pyramid optimization method, a three-level matching method is designed, which can quickly obtain the candidate pose of the target contour at the top of the image pyramid, combining the integral graph and the integration graph acceleration strategy based on weak classification. It can quickly obtain the rough positioning and rough angle of the target contour, which greatly improves the performance of the algorithm. In addition, to solve the problem that a large number of duplicate candidate points will be generated when the target candidate points are expanded, a method to obtain the optimal candidate points in the neighborhood of the target candidate points is designed, which can guarantee the matching accuracy and greatly reduce the calculation amount. In order to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, functional test experiments were designed for template building function and contour matching function, including uniform illumination condition, nonlinear condition and contour matching detection under different conditions. The results show that: (1) Under uniform illumination conditions, the detection accuracy can be maintained at about 93%. (2) Under nonlinear illumination conditions, the detection accuracy can be maintained at about 91.84%. (3) When there is an external interference source, there will be a false detection or no detection, and the overall defect detection rate remains above 94%. It is verified that the proposed method can meet the application requirements of common defect detection, and has good robustness and meets the expected functional requirements of the algorithm, providing a strong technical guarantee and data support for the design of embedded image sensors in the later stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection is essential for ensuring the quality of metallic products. Many excellent surface defect detectors have been designed in recent years. Most detection methods achieve success by using attention and feature pyramid modules. However, most attention modules consider only simple global information in channel features and incur heavy computational costs. Furthermore, the existing feature pyramids fail to effectively utilize the information from all multi-level features. To alleviate these issues, we design a metallic surface defect detector, named AP-Net. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adaptive attention module (LAA) and an enhanced feature pyramid module (EFP). We perform extensive experiments on three datasets. The experimental results show that the detection accuracies of the representative detectors can be significantly improved using our LAA and EFP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection is a critical task in the manufacturing industry to ensure product quality and machining efficiency. Image-based precise defect detection faces significant challenges due to defects lacking fixed shapes and the detection being heavily influenced by lighting conditions. Addressing the efficiency demands of defect detection algorithms, often deployed on embedded devices, and the highly imbalanced pixel ratio between foreground and background images, this paper introduces a multi-scale fusion staged U-shaped convolutional neural network (DEU-Net). The network provides segmentation results for defect anomalies while indicating the probability of defect presence. It enables the model to train with fewer parameters, a crucial requirement for practical applications. The proposed model achieves an MIoU of 66.94 and an F1 score of 74.89 with lower Params (36.675) and Flops (19.714). Comparative analysis with FCN, U-Net, Deeplab v3+, U-Net++, Attention U-Net, and Trans U-Net demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach in surface defect detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately detecting defects while reconstructing a high-quality normal background in surface defect detection using unsupervised methods remains a significant challenge. This study proposes an unsupervised method that effectively addresses this challenge by achieving both accurate defect detection and a high-quality normal background reconstruction without noise. We propose an adaptive weighted structural similarity (AW-SSIM) loss for focused feature learning. AW-SSIM improves structural similarity (SSIM) loss by assigning different weights to its sub-functions of luminance, contrast, and structure based on their relative importance for a specific training sample. Moreover, it dynamically adjusts the Gaussian window's standard deviation (σ) during loss calculation to balance noise reduction and detail preservation. An artificial defect generation algorithm (ADGA) is proposed to generate an artificial defect closely resembling real ones. We use a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, the model trains only on normal samples using AW-SSIM loss, allowing it to learn robust representations of normal features. In the second stage of training, the weights obtained from the first stage are used to train the model on both normal and artificially defective training samples. Additionally, the second stage employs a combined learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) and AW-SSIM loss. The combined loss helps the model in achieving high-quality normal background reconstruction while maintaining accurate defect detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a state-of-the-art defect detection accuracy. The proposed method achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AuROC) of 97.69% on six samples from the MVTec anomaly detection dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting cracks in the pavement is a vital component of ensuring road safety. Since manual identification of these cracks can be time-consuming, an automated method is needed to speed up this process. However, creating such a system is challenging due to factors including crack variability, variations in pavement materials, and the occurrence of miscellaneous objects and anomalies on the pavement. Motivated by the latest progress in deep learning applied to computer vision, we propose an effective U-Net-shaped model named DepthCrackNet. Our model employs the Double Convolution Encoder (DCE), composed of a sequence of convolution layers, for robust feature extraction while keeping parameters optimally efficient. We have incorporated the TriInput Multi-Head Spatial Attention (TMSA) module into our model; in this module, each head operates independently, capturing various spatial relationships and boosting the extraction of rich contextual information. Furthermore, DepthCrackNet employs the Spatial Depth Enhancer (SDE) module, specifically designed to augment the feature extraction capabilities of our segmentation model. The performance of the DepthCrackNet was evaluated on two public crack datasets: Crack500 and DeepCrack. In our experimental studies, the network achieved mIoU scores of 77.0% and 83.9% with the Crack500 and DeepCrack datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of surface defects is crucial to industrial manufacturing. In recent years, numerous detection methods based on computer vision have been successfully applied in the industry. However, industrial defect detection is still full of challenges. In one aspect, most of the industrial defects are extremely small. In another aspect, even though the intra-class defects have numerous similar elements, their outward appearances differ significantly. In this paper, we propose a dual-structure attention-based multi-level feature fusion network (DaMFFN) to address these two issues. In the first attention-based multi-level feature extraction structure, we introduce novel attention pooling to preserve more detailed information about the defective features of the tiny defect by giving certain regions varying weights. In the second attention-based multi-level feature fusion structure, we propose channel attention to capture the defect feature with the greatest potential for discrimination rather than all possible defect features, which is employed to prevent the incorrect detection of intra-class defects. The experiments demonstrate that the detection performance of the DaMFFN is better than other methods in five surface defect datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light guide plate (LGP) is a key component of liquid crystal display (LCD) display systems, so its quality directly affects the display effect of LCD. However, LGPs have complex background texture, low contrast, varying defect size and numerous defect types, which makes realizing efficient and accuracy-satisfactory surface defect automatic detection of LGPS still a big challenge. Therefore, combining its optical properties, dot distribution, defect imaging characteristics and detection requirements, a surface defect detection algorithm based on LGP-YOLO for practical industrial applications is proposed in this paper. To enhance the feature extraction ability of the network without dimensionality reduction, expand the effective receptive field and reduce the interference of invalid targets, we built the receptive field module (RFM) by combining the effective channel attention network (ECA-Net) and reviewing large kernel design in CNNs (RepLKNet). For the purpose of optimizing the performance of the network in downstream tasks, enhance the network's expression ability and improve the network's ability of detecting multi-scale targets, we construct the small detection module (SDM) by combining space-to-depth non-strided convolution (SPDConv) and omini-dimensional dynamic convolution (ODConv). Finally, an LGP defect dataset is constructed using a set of images collected from industrial sites, and a multi-round experiment is carried out to test the proposed method on the LGP detect dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed LGP-YOLO network can achieve high performance, with mAP and F1-score reaching 99.08% and 97.45% respectively, and inference speed reaching 81.15 FPS. This demonstrates that LGP-YOLO can strike a good balance between detection accuracy and inference speed, capable of meeting the requirements of high-precision and high-efficiency LGP defect detection in LGP manufacturing factories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection of sawn timber is a critical task to ensure the quality of wooden products. Current methods have challenges in considering detection accuracy and speed simultaneously, due to the complexity of defects and the massive length of sawn timbers. Specifically, there are scale variation, large intraclass difference and high interclass similarity in the defects, which reduce the detection accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient multilevel-feature integration network (EMINet) based on YOLOv5s. To obtain discriminative features of defects, the cross fusion module (CFM) is proposed to fully integrate the multilevel features of backbone. In the CFM, the local information aggregation is designed to enrich the detailed information of high-level features, and the global information aggregation is designed to enhance the semantic information of low-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EMINet achieves better accuracy with fast speed compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a cutting-edge model that has shown impressive performance in general object segmentation. The birth of the segment anything is a groundbreaking step towards creating a universal intelligent model. Due to its superior performance in general object segmentation, it quickly gained attention and interest. This makes SAM particularly attractive in industrial surface defect segmentation, especially for complex industrial scenes with limited training data. However, its segmentation ability for specific industrial scenes remains unknown. Therefore, in this work, we select three representative and complex industrial surface defect detection scenarios, namely strip steel surface defects, tile surface defects, and rail surface defects, to evaluate the segmentation performance of SAM. Our results show that although SAM has great potential in general object segmentation, it cannot achieve satisfactory performance in complex industrial scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer vision-based detection approaches have been widely used in defect inspection tasks. However, identifying small-sized defects is still a challenge for most existing methods. It is mainly because: (1) the existing methods fail to extract sufficient information from the small-sized defects; (2) the existing detectors cannot generate effective region proposals for small-sized defects, which results in a low recall rate. To address the above issues, an adaptive loss weighting multi-task model with attention-guide proposal generation is proposed. First, the proposed multi-task model can excavate contextual information to enrich the feature information of small-sized defect areas, enhancing the model's representation capability. Additionally, to improve the recall rate of small-sized defects, an object attention-guide proposal generation module is proposed by leveraging object attention to guide the confidence enhancement of small-sized defects, which can generate more high-quality region proposals for small-sized defects. Finally, to speed up the joint optimization of the proposed multi-task framework, an adaptive loss weighting algorithm is proposed to learn the optimal combination of multi-task loss functions by maintaining the gradient direction consistency and tuning each task's loss magnitude. The experimental results on the two public defect datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product quality inspection is a crucial element of industrial manufacturing, yet flaws such as blemishes and stains frequently emerge after the product is completed. Most research has utilized detection models and avoided segmenting networks due to the unequal distribution of faulty information. To overcome this challenge, this work presents a rapid segmentation-based technique for surface defect detection. The proposed model is based on a modified U-Net, which introduces a hybrid residual module (SAFM), combining an improved spatial attention mechanism and a feedforward neural network in place of the remaining downsampling layers, except for the first layer of downsampling in the encoder, and applies this residual module to the decoder structure. Dilated convolutions are also incorporated in the decoder to obtain more spatial information about the feature defects and to reduce the gradient vanishing problem of the model. An improved hybrid loss function with Dice and focal loss is introduced to alleviate the small defect segmentation problem. Comparative experiments were conducted on different segmentation-based inspection methods, revealing that the Dice coefficient (DSC) evaluated by the proposed approach is better than previous generic segmentation benchmarks on KolektorSDD, KolektorSDD2, and RSDD datasets, with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Additionally, the detection network displays higher precision in recognizing the characteristics of minor flaws. This paper proposes a practical and effective technique for anomaly segmentation in surface defect identification, delivering considerable improvements over previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rapidly evolving electric vehicle industry, the reliability of electronic systems is critical to ensuring vehicle safety and performance. Printed circuit boards (PCBs), serving as a cornerstone in these systems, necessitate efficient and accurate surface defect detection. Traditional PCB surface defect detection methods, like basic image processing and manual inspection, are inefficient and error-prone, especially for complex, minute, or irregular defects. Addressing this issue, this study introduces a technology based on the YOLOv5 network structure. By integrating the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), the model's capability in recognizing intricate and small defects is enhanced. Further, partial convolution (PConv) replaces traditional convolution for more effective spatial feature extraction and reduced redundant computation. In the network's final stage, multi-scale defect detection is implemented. Additionally, the normalized Wasserstein distance (NWD) loss function is introduced, considering relationships between different categories, thereby effectively solving class imbalance and multi-scale defect detection issues. Training and validation on a public PCB dataset showed the model's superior detection accuracy and reduced false detection rate compared to traditional methods. Real-time monitoring results confirm the model's ability to accurately detect various types and sizes of PCB surface defects, satisfying the real-time detection needs of electric vehicle production lines and providing crucial technical support for electric vehicle reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In actual industrial applications, the defect detection performance of deep learning models mainly depends on the size and quality of training samples. However, defective samples are difficult to obtain, which greatly limits the application of deep learning-based surface defect detection methods to industrial manufacturing processes. Aiming at solving the problem of insufficient defective samples, a surface defect detection method based on Frequency shift-Convolutional Autoencoder (Fs-CAE) network and Statistical Process Control (SPC) thresholding was proposed. The Fs-CAE network was established by adding frequency shift operation on the basis of the CAE network. The loss of high-frequency information can be prevented through the Fs-CAE network, thereby lowering the interference to defect detection during image reconstruction. The incremental SPC thresholding was introduced to detect defects automatically. The proposed method only needs samples without defects for model training and does not require labels, thus reducing manual labeling time. The surface defect detection method was tested on the air rudder image sets from the image acquisition platform and data augmentation methods. The experimental results indicated that the detection performance of the method proposed in this paper was superior to other surface defect detection methods based on image reconstruction and object detection algorithms. The new method exhibits low false positive rate (FP rate, 0%), low false negative rate (FN rate, 10%), high accuracy (95.19%) and short detection time (0.35 s per image), which shows great potential in practical industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important application of human-robot collaboration, intelligent detection of surface defects is crucial for production quality control, which also helps in relieving the workload of technical staff in human-centric smart manufacturing. To accurately detect defects with limited samples in industrial practice, a dual-metric neural network with attention-guided is proposed. First, an attention-guided recognition network with channel attention and position attention module is designed to efficiently learn representative defect features with limited samples. Second, aiming to detect defects with confusing surface images, a dual-metric function is presented to learn the classification boundary by controlling the distance of samples in feature space from intraclass and interclass. The experiment results on the fabric defect dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and few-shot accuracy. Further comparative experiments reveal that the dual-metric function is superior in improving the few-shot detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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During the production of steel, in view of the manufacturing engineering, transportation, and other factors, a steel surface may produce some defects, which will endanger the service life and performance of the steel. Therefore, the detection of defects on a steel surface is one of the indispensable links in production. The traditional defect detection methods have trouble in meeting the requirements of high detection accuracy and detection efficiency. Therefore, we propose the WFRE-YOLOv8s, based on YOLOv8s, for detecting steel surface defects. Firstly, we change the loss function to WIoU to address quality imbalances between data. Secondly, we newly designed the CFN in the backbone to replace C2f to reduce the number of parameters and FLOPs of the network. Thirdly, we utilized RFN to complete a new neck RFN to reduce the computational overhead and, at the same time, to fuse different scale features well. Finally, we incorporate the EMA attention module into the backbone to enhance the extraction of valuable features and improve the detection accuracy of the model. Extensive experiments are carried out on the NEU-DET to prove the validity of the designed module and model. The mAP0.5 of our proposed model reaches 79.4%, which is 4.7% higher than that of YOLOv8s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the rise of the automation wave, reducing manual judgment, especially in defect detection in factories, has become crucial. The automation of image recognition has emerged as a significant challenge. However, the problem of how to effectively improve the classification of defect detection and the accuracy of the mean average precision (mAP) is a continuous process of improvement and has evolved from the original visual inspection of defects to the present deep learning detection system. This paper presents an application of deep learning, and the task-aligned approach is firstly used on metal defects, and the anchor and bounding box of objects and categories are continuously optimized by mutual correction. We used the task-aligned one-stage object detection (TOOD) model, then improved and optimized it, followed by deformable ConvNets v2 (DCNv2) to adjust the deformable convolution, and finally used soft efficient non-maximum suppression (Soft-NMS) to optimize intersection over union (IoU) and adjust the IoU threshold and many other experiments. In the Northeastern University surface defect detection dataset (NEU-DET) for surface defect detection, mAP increased from 75.4% to 77.9%, a 2.5% increase in mAP, and mAP was also improved compared to existing advanced models, which has potential for future use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection in industrial environments is crucial for quality management and has significant research value. General detection networks, such as the YOLO series, have proven effective in various dataset detections. However, due to the complex and varied surface defects of industrial products, many defects occupy a small proportion of the surface and fall into the category of typical small target detection problems. Moreover, the complexity of general detection network architectures relies on high-tech hardware, making it difficult to deploy on devices without GPUs or on edge computing and mobile devices. To meet the practical needs of industrial product defect inspection applications, this paper proposes a lightweight network specifically designed for defect detection in industrial fields. This network is composed of four parts: a backbone network, a multiscale feature aggregation network, a residual enhancement network, and an attention enhancement network. The network includes a backbone network that integrates attention layers for feature extraction, a multiscale feature aggregation network for semantic information, a residual enhancement network for spatial focus, and an attention enhancement network for global–local feature interaction. These components enhance detection performance for diverse defects while maintaining low hardware requirements. Experimental results show that this network outperforms the latest and most popular YOLOv5n and YOLOv8n models in the five indicators P, R, F1, mAP@.5, and GFLOPS when used on four public datasets. It even approaches or surpasses the YOLOv8s and YOLOv5s models with several times the GFLOPS computation. It balances the requirements of lightweight real-time and accuracy in the scenario of industrial product surface defect detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processing of aerial images taken by drones is a challenging task due to their high resolution and the presence of small objects. The scale of the objects varies diversely depending on the position of the drone, which can result in loss of information or increased difficulty in detecting small objects. To address this issue, images are either randomly cropped or divided into small patches before training and inference. This paper proposes a defect detection framework that harnesses the advantages of slice-aided inference for small and medium-size damage on the surface of wind turbine blades. This framework enables the comparison of different slicing strategies, including a conventional patch division strategy and a more recent slice-aided hyper-inference, on several state-of-the-art deep neural network baselines for the detection of surface defects in wind turbine blade images. Our experiments provide extensive empirical results, highlighting the benefits of using the slice-aided strategy and the significant improvements made by these networks on an ultra high-resolution drone image dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridge inspection and monitoring are usually used to evaluate the status and integrity of bridge structures to ensure their safety and reliability. Computer vision (CV)-based methods have the advantages of being low cost, simple to operate, remote, and non-contact, and have been widely used in bridge inspection and monitoring in recent years. Therefore, this paper reviews three significant aspects of CV-based methods, including surface defect detection, vibration measurement, and vehicle parameter identification. Firstly, the general procedure for CV-based surface defect detection is introduced, and its application for the detection of cracks, concrete spalling, steel corrosion, and multi-defects is reviewed, followed by the robot platforms for surface defect detection. Secondly, the basic principle of CV-based vibration measurement is introduced, followed by the application of displacement measurement, modal identification, and damage identification. Finally, the CV-based vehicle parameter identification methods are introduced and their application for the identification of temporal and spatial parameters, weight parameters, and multi-parameters are summarized. This comprehensive literature review aims to provide guidance for selecting appropriate CV-based methods for bridge inspection and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of higher recognition accuracy and speed with smaller model sizes has been a major research topic in the detection of surface defects in steel. In this paper, we propose an improved high-speed and high-precision Efficient Fusion Coordination network (EFC-YOLO) without increasing the model's size. Since modifications to enhance feature extraction in shallow networks tend to affect the speed of model inference, in order to simultaneously ensure the accuracy and speed of detection, we add the improved Fusion-Faster module to the backbone network of YOLOv7. Partial Convolution (PConv) serves as the basic operator of the module, which strengthens the feature-extraction ability of shallow networks while maintaining speed. Additionally, we incorporate the Shortcut Coordinate Attention (SCA) mechanism to better capture the location information dependency, considering both lightweight design and accuracy. The de-weighted Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) structure used in the neck part of the network improves the original Path Aggregation Network (PANet)-like structure by adding step branches and reducing computations, achieving better feature fusion. In the experiments conducted on the NEU-DET dataset, the final model achieved an 85.9% mAP and decreased the GFLOPs by 60%, effectively balancing the model's size with the accuracy and speed of detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the characteristics of complex texture backgrounds, uneven brightness, varying defect sizes, and multiple defect types of the bearing surface images, a surface defect detection method for bearing rings is proposed based on improved YOLOv5. First, replacing the C3 module in the backbone network with a C2f module can effectively reduce the number of network parameters and computational complexity, thereby improving the speed and accuracy of the backbone network. Second, adding the SPD module into the backbone and neck networks enhances their ability to process low-resolution and small-object images. Next, replacing the nearest-neighbor upsampling with the lightweight and universal CARAFE operator fully utilizes feature semantic information, enriches contextual information, and reduces information loss during transmission, thereby effectively improving the model's diversity and robustness. Finally, we constructed a dataset of bearing ring surface images collected from industrial sites and conducted numerous experiments based on this dataset. Experimental results show that the mean average precision (mAP) of the network is 97.3%, especially for dents and black spot defects, improved by 2.2% and 3.9%, respectively, and that the detection speed can reach 100 frames per second (FPS). Compared with mainstream surface defect detection algorithms, the proposed method shows significant improvements in both accuracy and detection time and can meet the requirements of industrial defect detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is a significant step in image analysis and computer vision. Many entropy-based approaches have been presented on this topic. Among them, Tsallis entropy isone of the best-performing methods. In this paper, the surface defect images of galvanised steel sheets were studied. Atwo-dimensional asymmetric Tsallis cross-entropy image segmentation algorithm based on chaotic bee colony algorithm optimisation was used to investigate the segmentation of surface defects under complex texture backgrounds. On the basis of Tsallis entropy threshold segmentation, a more concise expression form was used to define the asymmetric Tsallis cross-entropy in order to reduce the calculation complexity of the algorithm. The chaotic algorithm was combined with the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to construct the chaotic bee colony algorithm, so that the optimal threshold of Tsallis entropy could be quickly identified. The experimental results showed that compared with the maximum Shannon entropy algorithm, the calculation time of this algorithm decreased by about 58% and the threshold value increased by about (26%, 54%). Compared with the two-dimensional Tsallis cross-entropy algorithm, the calculation time of this algorithm decreased by about 35% and about 20% was improved in the g-axis direction only. Compared with the two-dimensional asymmetric Tsallis cross-entropy algorithm, the calculation time of this algorithm decreased by about 30% and the threshold values of the two algorithms were almost the same. The algorithm proposed in this paper can rapidly and effectively segment defect targets, making it a more suitable method for detecting surface defects in factories with a rapid production pace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]