Surface defect detection of steel strips based on classification priority YOLOv3-dense network

Abstract

ABSTRACT The steel strip is an essential raw material in the machinery industry. Besides, the surface defects of the steel strip directly determine its performance. To achieve rapid and effective detection of the defects, a CP-YOLOv3-dense (classification priority YOLOv3 DenseNet) neural network was proposed in the present study. The model used YOLOv3 as basic network, implemented priority classification on the images, and then replaced the two residual network modules with two dense network modules. Therefore, the network can receive the multi-layer convolution features output by the dense connection block before making predictions, consequently enhancing the reuse and fusion of features. Finally, the six kinds of surface defects were detected by the improved network. According to the results, the detection precision of the CP-YOLOv3-dense network is 85.7%, the recall rate is 82.3%, the mean average precision is 82.73%, and the detection time of each image is 9.68 ms.