YOLO-MAD: Multi-Scale Geometric Structure Feature Extraction and Fusion for Steel Surface Defect Detection

Lightweight visual models are crucial for industrial defect detection tasks. Traditional methods and even some lightweight detectors often struggle with the trade-off between high computational demands and insufficient accuracy. To overcome these issues, this study introduces YOLO-MAD, an innovative model optimized through a multi-scale geometric structure feature extraction and fusion scheme. YOLO-MAD integrates three key modules: AKConv for robust geometric feature extraction, BiFPN to facilitate effective multi-scale feature integration, and Detect_DyHead for dynamic optimization of detection capabilities. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant performance improvements: YOLO-MAD achieves a 5.4% mAP increase on the NEU-DET dataset and a 4.8% mAP increase on the GC10-DET dataset. Crucially, this is achieved under a moderate computational load (9.4 GFLOPs), outperforming several prominent lightweight models in detection accuracy while maintaining comparable efficiency. The model also shows enhanced recognition performance for most defect categories. This work presents a pioneering approach that balances lightweight design with high detection performance by efficiently leveraging multi-scale geometric feature extraction and fusion, offering a new paradigm for industrial defect detection.