YOLO-HDEW: An Efficient PCB Defect Detection Model

To address the challenge of detecting small defects in Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), a YOLO-HDEW model based on the enhanced YOLOv8 architecture is proposed. A high-resolution detection layer is introduced at the P2 feature level to improve sensitivity to small targets. Depthwise Separable Convolution (DSConv) is used for downsampling, reducing parameter complexity. An Edge-enhanced Multi-scale Parallel Attention mechanism (EMP-Attention) is integrated to capture multi-scale and edge features. The EMP mechanism is incorporated into the C2f module to form the C2f-EMP module, and dynamic non-monotonic Wise-IoU (W-IoU) loss is employed to enhance bounding box regression. The model is evaluated on the PKU-Market-PCB, DeepPCB, and NEU-DET datasets, with experimental results showing that YOLO-HDEW achieves 98.1% accuracy, 91.6% recall, 90.3% mAP@0.5, and 61.7% mAP@0.5:0.95, surpassing YOLOv8 by 1.5%, 2.3%, 1.2%, and 1.9%, respectively. Additionally, the model demonstrates strong generalization performance on the DeePCB and NEU-DET datasets. These results indicate that YOLO-HDEW significantly improves detection accuracy while maintaining a manageable model size, offering an effective solution for PCB defect detection.