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The safety and reliability of cables are directly linked to the safe operation of bridges as crucial load-bearing components. The accuracy and efficiency of current methods are still insufficient to segment and quantitatively characterize surface defects on cables. This paper proposes a novel and efficient method for the refined segmentation and quantitative characterization of bridge cable surface defects based on an improved you only look at coefficients++ (YOLACT++) model. For defect segmentation, several enhancements have been made to the YOLACT++ model, including incorporating the convolutional block attention module (CBAM), optimizing the anchor box generation mechanism, and introducing the smoother Mish activation function, which enhances both the accuracy and speed of defect detection. For quantitative characterization, the method adopts surface correction algorithms, pixel statistics, and crack skeleton extraction, resulting in a more accurate representation of defect areas and the length and width of cracks. Compared to the baseline model, the optimized model achieves a 3.58 % improvement in mean average precision (mAP) and an inference speed of 25.74 frames per second (FPS). The results show that the error is within 10 % compared with the manually measured area, which offers a more objective and comprehensive foundation for cable safety assessment.