Enhancing Steel Surface Defect Detection: A Hyper-YOLO Approach with Ghost Modules and Hyper FPN.

Steel surface defect detection poses a significant challenge in the steel industry, aiming to enhance product quality and production efficiency. Traditional mechanical and optical detection methods exhibit relatively low efficiency and poor real-time performance in detecting acceptable defects on the surface of steel strips. This paper proposes a new model named Hyper-YOLO for steel surface defect detection in steel strips. Firstly, the CSP module in the conventional YOLO backbone network is replaced with the Ghost module. The Ghost module, a lightweight convolutional module, enhances model efficiency by reducing parameter count and computational load while maintaining satisfactory performance. Secondly, researchers replace the PAFPN module in YOLO V5 in the bottleneck section with the Hyper FPN module. Hyper FPN, an improved feature pyramid network module, leverages features at different scales for multi-level feature fusion, enhancing the model's capability to detect targets at various scales. Lastly, improvements are made in the loss functions for both training and prediction stages. The α-CIoU loss function is introduced during training to substitute the original CIoU loss function, and the α-DIoU loss function is utilized during prediction instead of the original DIoU loss function. These enhanced loss functions effectively measure the accuracy and position precision of target boxes, thereby improving the detection performance of the model. Through these enhancements, the Hyper YOLO model achieves an overall performance improvement of 4.58% over the baseline model. This indicates that Hyper YOLO performs outstanding surface defect detection in steel strips, providing innovative insights for the YOLO V5 model. These improvements not only elevate the accuracy and efficiency of the model but also hold significant guidance for similar research and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]