ASD-YOLO: An aircraft surface defects detection method using deformable convolution and attention mechanism

Aircraft surface defect (ASD) detection is crucial for ensuring flight safety. Addressing challenges such as largescale variations, irregular shapes, and sample imbalance in ASD detection, this paper proposes a ASD-YOLO network based on YOLOv5. ASD-YOLO incorporates several enhancements to improve recognition capabilities. Firstly, a new deformable convolutional feature extraction module (DCNC3) is designed to better learn defects of different shapes, which is combined with a global attention mechanism (GAM) to pay more attention to defects region information. Secondly, the feature representation of small defects is bolstered by the contextual enhancement module (CEM). Lastly, to alleviate sample imbalance problem, we introduce an exponential sliding average weight function (EMA-Slide). Experimental results on two datasets show improvements in mean Average Precision (mAP) by 5.7% and 3.4%, respectively, surpassing mainstream algorithms and offering novel approach to ASD detection.