Real-time Detection of Steel Strip Surface Defects Based on Improved YOLO Detection Network

The surface defects of steel strip have diverse and complex features, and surface defects caused by different production lines tend to have different characteristics. Therefore, the detection algorithms for the surface defects of steel strip should have good generalization performance. Aiming at detecting surface defects of steel strip, we established a dataset of six types of surface defects on cold-rolled steel strip and augmented it in order to reduce over-fitting. We improved the You Only Look Once (YOLO) network and made it all convolutional. Our improved network, which consists of 27 convolution layers, provides an end-to-end solution for the surface defects detection of steel strip. We evaluated the six types of defects with our network and reached performance of 97.55% mAP and 95.86% recall rate. Besides, our network achieves 99% detection rate with speed of 83 FPS, which provides methodological support for real-time surface defects detection of steel strip. It can also predict the location and size information of defect regions, which is of great significance for evaluating the quality of an entire steel strip production line.