PPFS-YOLO: Physics-Prior Frequency-Spatial Fusion for Robust Container Surface Damage Detection

Container surface damage detection is critical for ensuring the structural integrity and operational safety of intermodal freight transport. However, visual pseudo-textures arising from rust stains, specular reflections, and paint weathering cause frequent false positives, while the scarcity of puncture-type defects (Hole class) leads to missed detections. Existing YOLO-family detectors address neither the frequency-domain characteristics of such pseudo-textures nor the physical priors inherent in genuine structural damage. In this paper, we propose PPFS-YOLO, a physics-prior frequency-spatial fusion framework built upon YOLOv12s. Two lightweight modules are introduced: (1) Frequency-Spatial Fusion (FSF), which applies a learnable spectral mask in the Fourier domain and performs gated fusion with spatial features to suppress pseudo-texture responses; and (2) Edge-Guided Auxiliary Supervision Module (FIM), which encodes Sobel-derived edge priors as a differentiable L1 constraint (Lphy) to regularize feature learning toward physically plausible damage boundaries. Three pairs of FSF–FIM are inserted into the YOLOv12s neck and head at P3, P4, and P4-head scales. Experiments on a container damage dataset containing 7013 images and three classes (Dent, Hole, Rusty) demonstrate that PPFS-YOLO achieves 64.86% mAP@50, a +12.35 percentage-point improvement over the YOLO12s baseline (SGD, unified optimizer), with only +0.79 M additional parameters (+8.6%) and a modest latency overhead of 2.9 ms (17.2 ms vs. 14.3 ms at 640×640 on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU (NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA)). Ablation analysis reveals that Lphy is the critical catalyst: without it, the combined FSF+FIM modules yield only +0.83 pp, whereas the full model achieves +12.10 pp—underscoring the synergy between frequency-domain fusion and physics-prior regularization.