ACD‐YOLO: Improved YOLOv5‐based method for steel surface defects detection

Abstract

AbstractSince the quality of steel is of paramount importance in modern production, the defects detection of steel surface is significantly crucial. In this field, two‐stage detection algorithms have encountered issues about low detection speed, while one‐stage detection algorithms have room for improvement in detection accuracy. How to trade‐off between accuracy and speed of detection to better meet the demands of industrial production remains a challenge. To address this problem, this paper proposes a You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5)‐based improved method ACD‐YOLO. ACD‐YOLO model incorporates anchors optimization, context augmentation module, and efficient convolution operators. In anchor optimization, the boundaries of anchors are optimized using an improved genetic algorithm. Moreover, to improve detection accuracy, a context augmentation module is incorporated into both the head and the backbone end of the network. Additionally, efficient convolution operators are adopted to address the increase of computation complexity caused by the context augmentation module. Experimental results show that ACD‐YOLO achieves mean average precision of 79.3%, with frames per second of 72. Compared to reference methods, ACD‐YOLO achieves the best balance between accuracy and speed of detection, and is more suitable for practice industrial production.