A high-speed YOLO detection model for steel surface defects with the channel residual convolution and fusion-distribution

Accurately and efficiently detecting steel surface defects is a critical step in steel manufacturing. However, the compromise between the detection speed and accuracy remains a major challenge, especially for steel surface defects with large variations in the scale. To address the issue, an improved you only look once (YOLO) based detection model is proposed through the reinforcement of its backbone and neck. Firstly, for the reduction of the redundant parameters and also the improvement of the characterization ability of the model, an effective channel residual structure is adopted to construct a channel residual convolution module and channel residual cross stage partial module as components of the backbone network, respectively. They realize the extraction of both the shallow feature and multi-scale feature simultaneously under a small number of convolutional parameters. Secondly, in the neck of YOLO, a fusion-distribution strategy is employed, which extracts and fuses multi-scale feature maps from the backbone network to provide global information, and then distributes global information into local features of different branches through an inject attention mechanism, thus enhancing the feature gap between different branches. Then, a model called CRFD-YOLO is derived for the steel surface defect detection and localization for the situations where both speed and accuracy are demanding. Finally, extensive experimental validations are conducted to evaluate the performance of CRFD-YOLO. The validation results indicate that CRFD-YOLO achieves a satisfactory detection performance with a mean average precision of 81.3% on the NEU-DET and 71.1% on the GC10-DET. Additionally, CRFD-YOLO achieves a speed of 161 frames per second, giving a great potential in real-time detection and localization tasks.