A deep learning model for steel surface defect detection

Abstract Industrial defect detection is a hot topic in the field of computer vision. It is a challenging task due to complex features and many categories of industrial defects. In this paper, a deep learning model based on the multiscale feature extraction module is introduced for steel surface defect detection. The main focus on the feature extraction capability of the model and feature fusion capability to improve the accuracy of the model for steel surface defect detection. First, to improve the feature extraction ability of the model, a multiscale feature extraction (MSFE) module is introduced. The MSFE module can effectively extract multiscale features through three branches that have different convolution kernel sizes. Second, an efficient feature fusion (EFF) module is proposed to optimize feature fusion by adding features from the backbone network to the neck network. Third, this paper puts forward a new Bottleneck module by reducing the normalization layer and activation function in the original Bottleneck module. Finally, the backbone network is deepened to further enhance the feature extraction ability of the model. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public NEU-DET dataset. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the designed modules and the proposed model. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model achieves optimal accuracy(73.08% mAP@0.5) while maintaining a small number of parameters.