Steel Surface Defect Research Articles

Semantic Web-Based Image Super-Resolution for Enhanced Steel Surface Defect Detection

This study addresses the challenges of steel surface defect detection by introducing the ATG-SRGAN model, which integrates Semantic Web technologies with an Adaptive Transformer and Generation module. By leveraging self-attention mechanisms and residual convolution within the SRGAN framework, the model enhances image resolution, reduces noise, and uncovers finer details, achieving superior PSNR (37.17) and SSIM (0.9590) metrics. Integrated with an improved YOLOv8-ghost-p2 framework, the model also attains a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 81.2 and a recall rate of 76 in defect detection. These results demonstrate the model's potential to significantly improve automated quality control in industrial settings, highlighting the importance of Semantic Web technologies in advancing defect detection methods.

Hybrid-DC: A Hybrid Framework Using ResNet-50 and Vision Transformer for Steel Surface Defect Classification in the Rolling Process

This study introduces Hybrid-DC, a hybrid deep-learning model integrating ResNet-50 and Vision Transformer (ViT) for high-accuracy steel surface defect classification. Hybrid-DC leverages ResNet-50 for efficient feature extraction at both low and high levels and utilizes ViT’s global context learning to enhance classification precision. A unique hybrid attention layer and an attention fusion mechanism enable Hybrid-DC to adapt to the complex, variable patterns typical of steel surface defects. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Hybrid-DC achieves substantial accuracy improvements and significantly reduced loss compared to traditional models like MobileNetV2 and ResNet, with a validation accuracy reaching 0.9944. The results suggest that this model, characterized by rapid convergence and stable learning, can be applied for real-time quality control in steel manufacturing and other high-precision industries, enhancing automated defect detection efficiency.

A steel defect detection method based on edge feature extraction via the Sobel operator.

Scratches and cracks in steel severely affect its service life and performance. However, owing to the irregular shapes and sizes of steel surface defects, defects within the same class may be different, whereas defects between classes may be similar. Existing methods focus only on spatial information, resulting in low detection accuracy. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes the ECDY (EIFEM CARAFE DyHead) network to enhance the detection capability of steel defects. We first design a feature extraction module that focuses on the edge information of feature contours. This module uses the Sobel operator to extract the edge information of a feature and fuses it with the overall spatial information so that richer semantic information can be obtained. The module has improved accuracy in the YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and YOLOv10 versions, and uses fewer parameters and calculations. In particular, in YOLOv8x, mAP@0.5 increased by 2.5%, and the number of parameters was reduced by 12.4M. Second, to retain the detailed information in the feature pyramid, and to better reconstruct features, we choose the content-aware reassembly feature method (CARAFE) as the upsampling method. Finally, the detection head was replaced with a dynamic unified detection head (DyHead) to adapt to different defect sizes and different task requirements. Compared with YOLOv8s, the proposed method improves precision by 1.6%, recall by 4%, and mAP@0.5 by 4%. This value is 4.2% higher than the mAP@0.5 of the current SOTA model RT-DETR-L in the field of object detection and has 23.2M fewer parameters.

XAIP: An eXplainable AI‐Based Pipeline for Identifying Key Factors of Surface Defects in Strip Steel

The surface defect has a direct impact on the performance and quality of the final product, so it is crucial to identify the key factors causing the defect. To achieve accurate key factor identification, an eXplainable AI‐based Pipeline (XAIP) is proposed herein. The proposed XAIP combines data mode clustering and local model construction to meet practical application requirements. Meanwhile, after analyzing the characteristics of practical data, a strategy for defect rate calculation is designed to provide more fine‐grained defect‐related information to supervise model training. The final identification results are presented by a two‐stage explainable method, which is designed to reveal the information of data modes and key variables and can give engineers more specific defect‐related information. The experiment results based on two practical manufacturing datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Maximizing Steel Slice Defect Detection: Integrating ResNet101 Deep Features with SVM via Bayesian Optimization

Accurate detection of defects on steel surfaces is crucial for maintaining quality standards in steel production. This paper addresses the challenge of classifying steel sheets into distinct defect categories by presenting a robust method that leverages deep learning and advanced optimization techniques. We propose a novel approach that utilizes the ResNet101 model to extract deep features, which are then classified using a support vector machine (SVM). To enhance the SVM's performance, Bayesian optimization is employed for hyperparameter tuning. Our method is validated using the "Severstal: Steel Defect Detection" dataset from Kaggle, achieving a validation accuracy of 89.1% and a test accuracy of 90.6%, with a classification error of 0.10934. Additionally, the area under the curve (AUC) for each class exceeds 0.95 in both the validation and test sets, demonstrating excellent discriminatory power. Further evaluation on the DAGM dataset achieved flawless results, with an accuracy of 100%, AUC of 1, sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, MCC of 100%, F1 score of 1, and kappa of 100%. On the NEU dataset, our method achieved an accuracy of 97.92%, sensitivity of 97.92%, specificity of 99.58%, precision of 98.06%, F1 score of 0.9791, MCC of 97.55%, and kappa of 92.50%. These results demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of the proposed method, offering an efficient and reliable solution for automating steel defect detection and surface defect classification in industrial applications.

A Strip Steel Surface Defect Salient Object Detection Based on Channel, Spatial and Self-Attention Mechanisms

Strip steel is extensively utilized in industries such as automotive manufacturing and aerospace due to its superior machinability, economic benefits, and adaptability. However, defects on the surface of steel strips, such as inclusions, patches, and scratches, significantly affect the performance and service life of the product. Therefore, the salient object detection of surface defects on strip steel is crucial to ensure the quality of the final product. Many factors, such as the low contrast of surface defects on strip steel, the diversity of defect types, complex texture structures, and irregular defect distribution, hinder existing detection technologies from accurately identifying and segmenting defect areas against complex backgrounds. To address the above problems, we propose a novel detector called S3D-SOD for the salient object detection of strip steel surface defects. For the encoding stage, a residual self-attention block is proposed to explore semantic information cues of high-level features to locate and guide low-level feature information. In addition, we apply a general residual channel and spatial attention to low-level features, enabling the model to adaptively focus on the key channels and spatial areas of feature maps with high resolutions, thereby enhancing the encoder features and accelerating the convergence of the model. For the decoding stage, a simple residual decoder block with an upsampling operation is proposed to realize the integration and interaction of feature information between different layers. Here, the simple residual decoder block is used for feature integration due to the following observation: backbone networks like ResNet and the Swin Transformer, after being pretrained on the large dataset ImageNet and then fine-tuned on a smaller dataset for strip steel surface defects, are capable of extracting feature maps that contain both general image features and the specific characteristics required for the salient object detection of strip steel surface defects. The experimental results on the SD-saliency-900 dataset show that S3D-SOD is better than advanced methods, and it has strong generalization ability and robustness.

Surface Defect Identification of Strip Steel Using ViT‐RepVGG

In the production of strip steel, surface defect identification is crucial for improving product quality and ensuring smooth subsequent processes. Existing technologies face challenges such as low detection efficiency and susceptibility to environmental noise. This article employs an automated deep learning method without requiring consideration of complex environmental changes and proposes an improved RepVGG (ViT‐RepVGG) model for surface defect identification. The model is based on the RepVGG architecture, and the study explores the impact of incorporating the self‐attention mechanism of ViT under various addition strategies on model performance. A comparison is made between the optimized model and classic network models, as well as recently published models, in terms of identification performance. The research also examines the performance variations of the model under different hyperparameter settings and its identification performance for six types of defects. The results indicate that adding the ViT module to stage 3 of the A1‐type RepVGG, with a learning rate, optimizer, and activation function set to 0.0001, Adam, and Gelu, respectively, yields the optimal ViT‐RepVGG model performance. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of enhancing classification performance by incorporating the self‐attention mechanism into neural networks, providing an effective foundation for the online identification of strip steel surface defects.

Steel Surface Defect Detection Based on YOLOv8-TLC

Steel Surface Defect Detection Based on YOLOv8-TLC

Sparse cross-transformer network for surface defect detection.

Quality control processes with automation ensure that customers receive defect-free products that meet their needs. However, the performance of real-world surface defect detection is often severely hindered by the scarcity of data. Recently, few-shot learning has been widely proposed as a solution to the data sufficiency problem by leveraging a limited number of base class samples. However, achieving discriminative and generalization capabilities with few samples remains a challenging task in various surface defect detection scenarios. In this paper, we propose a sparse cross-transformer network (SCTN) for surface defect detection. Specifically, we introduce a residual layer module to enhance the network's ability to retain crucial information. Next, we propose a sparse layer module within the cross-transformer to increase computational efficiency. Finally, we incorporate a squeeze-and-excitation network into the cross-transformer to enhance the attention mechanism between local patches outputted by the transformer encoder. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on the cylinder liner defect dataset, the NEU steel surface defect dataset, and the PKU-Market-PCB dataset, achieving the best mean average precision of 62.73%, 85.29%, and 88.7%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, the results indicate that SCTN enhances the network's discriminative ability and effectively improves generalization across various surface defect detection tasks.

Improved RT-DETR Approach for Steel Surface Defect Identification

Improved RT-DETR Approach for Steel Surface Defect Identification

An Improved YOLOv8n Algorithm for Steel Surface Defect Detection

Due to the manufacturing process and other aspects, steel surface defects vary in shape and size, which is a difficult point for defect detection. For this reason, this paper proposes a steel surface defect detection algorithm based on YOLOv8n. The algorithm improves the C2f module of Backbone in this network by adding Context Guided Block (CG block), which can effectively extract the local features, surrounding context and global context, and integrate this information to improve the precision and accuracy of detection. Meanwhile, we also change the detection header of YOLOv8 to Detect_ASFF by introducing the Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) technique. This improvement effectively filters out the conflicting information, which can allow the model to have a better adaptability at different scales. In this paper, Shape-IoU is adopted as the bounding box loss function to make up for the traditional IoU loss that ignores the intrinsic properties of the bounding box in the calculation process. After optimisation, mAP@0.5 are improved to 67.9% and mAP@0.5~0.95 are improved to 35.1%, which is 2.8% and 1.1% respectively. The improved algorithm in this paper has improved in detection accuracy, which proves the practicality and effectiveness of the algorithm in this paper.

A Lightweight Strip Steel Surface Defect Detection Network Based on Improved YOLOv8

Strip steel surface defect detection has become a crucial step in ensuring the quality of strip steel production. To address the issues of low detection accuracy and long detection times in strip steel surface defect detection algorithms caused by varying defect sizes and blurred images during acquisition, this paper proposes a lightweight strip steel surface defect detection network, YOLO-SDS, based on an improved YOLOv8. Firstly, StarNet is utilized to replace the backbone network of YOLOv8, achieving lightweight optimization while maintaining accuracy. Secondly, a lightweight module DWR is introduced into the neck and combined with the C2f feature extraction module to enhance the model’s multi-scale feature extraction capability. Finally, an occlusion-aware attention mechanism SEAM is incorporated into the detection head, enabling the model to better capture and process features of occluded objects, thus improving performance in complex scenarios. Experimental results on the open-source NEU-DET dataset show that the improved model reduces parameters by 34.4% compared with the original YOLOv8 algorithm while increasing average detection accuracy by 1.5%. And it shows good generalization performance on the deepPCB dataset. Compared with other defect detection models, YOLO-SDS offers significant advantages in terms of parameter count and detection speed. Additionally, ablation experiments validate the effectiveness of each module.

YOLO-LFPD: A Lightweight Method for Strip Surface Defect Detection.

Strip steel surface defect recognition research has important research significance in industrial production. Aiming at the problems of defect feature extraction, slow detection speed, and insufficient datasets, YOLOv5 is improved on the basis of YOLOv5, and the YOLO-LFPD (lightweight fine particle detection) model is proposed. By introducing the RepVGG (Re-param VGG) module, the robustness of the model is enhanced, and the expressive ability of the model is improved. FasterNet is used to replace the backbone network, which ensures accuracy and accelerates the inference speed, making the model more suitable for real-time monitoring. The use of pruning, a GA genetic algorithm with OTA loss function, further reduces the model size while better learning the strip steel defect feature information, thus improving the generalisation ability and accuracy of the model. The experimental results show that the introduction of the RepVGG module and the use of FasterNet can well improve the model performance, with a reduction of 48% in the number of parameters, a reduction of 13% in the number of GFLOPs, an inference time of 77% of the original, and an optimal accuracy compared with the network models in recent years. The experimental results on the NEU-DET dataset show that the accuracy of YOLO-LFPD is improved by 3% to 81.2%, which is better than other models, and provides new ideas and references for the lightweight strip steel surface defect detection scenarios and application deployment.

Multi-scale sensing and multi-dimensional feature enhancement for surface defect detection of hot-rolled steel strip

ABSTRACT Surface defect detection of hot-rolled steel strip is a crucial process in its production. Aiming at the problem of poor detection accuracy caused by complex shape of defect features and imbalance between object scale and feature scale, this paper proposes a multi-scale sensing and multi-dimensional feature enhancement algorithm. Firstly, a multi-branch residual aggregation module (MRAM) is proposed, which uses the interactive features of different receptive fields between layers to capture global and local texture features, improving the feature extraction capability for defects of different scales. Then, the multi-dimensional attention enhancement head (MAEH) is proposed, which integrates feature information from different prediction branches and realises feature information enhancement in scale, space and channel dimensions for the aggregated information to improve the accuracy and robustness of steel surface defect detection. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 82.7% mAP and 89 FPS on the NEU-DET dataset, and 73.3% mAP and 94 FPS on the GC10-DET dataset. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm has the highest mAP, strong generalisation ability, and good real-time performance, which proves its effectiveness in detecting hot-rolled steel strip surface defects.

ECM-YOLO: a real-time detection method of steel surface defects based on multiscale convolution

Steel surface defects, characterized by multiple types, varied scales, and overlapping occurrences, directly impact the quality, performance, and reliability of industrial products. Proposing a high-precision and high-speed steel surface defect detection algorithm is crucial for ensuring product quality. In this regard, this paper introduces ECM-YOLO, a detection network based on YOLOv8n. First, addressing the insufficient information capture of the C2f module, the C2f enhanced multiscale convolution processing (C2f_EMSCP) module is proposed, enhancing global and local feature capture capabilities through multiscale convolutions. Second, to further enhance the network’s robustness and focus on critical information, the channel prior convolutional attention (CPCA) mechanism is integrated between the backbone and neck networks to facilitate more efficient information transmission. Last, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, detection head, i.e., multiscale simple and efficient anchor matching head (MultiSEAMHead), is proposed to mitigate accuracy issues arising from overlaps between different types of defects. Experimental results demonstrate that ECM-YOLO achieves mAPs of 78.9% and 68.2% on the NEU-DET and GC 10-DET data sets, respectively, outperforming YOLOv8n by 2.5% and 4.4%. Moreover, ECM-YOLO excels in model parameters, computational efficiency, and inference speed compared with other models. These findings highlight the applicability of ECM-YOLO for real-time defect detection in industrial settings.

Experimental Design of Steel Surface Defect Detection Based on MSFE-YOLO—An Improved YOLOV5 Algorithm with Multi-Scale Feature Extraction

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technology into student training programs is strategically crucial for developing future professionals with both forward-thinking capabilities and practical skills. This paper uses steel surface defect detection as a case study to propose a simulation-based teaching method grounded in deep learning. The method encompasses the entire process from data preprocessing and model training to validation analysis and innovation optimization with the goal of deepening students’ understanding of AI technology and enhancing their ability to apply it to real-world scenarios. We have designed an experimental framework that incorporates the Efficient Multi-Scale Attention (EMA) mechanism into the Backbone network. This approach helps students understand the principles of feature extraction and the core functions of attention mechanisms. Additionally, we introduced a novel architecture—Convolution 3 Dilated Convolution X (C3DX)—into the Neck network. This architecture effectively expands the network’s receptive field, improves its ability to capture multi-scale information, and thus enhances defect detection accuracy. Furthermore, the implementation of the Efficient Intersection over Union (EIoU) loss function optimizes the bounding box predictions, further increasing the model’s accuracy and robustness. Overall, the teaching design not only ensures that the content remains at the cutting edge of technology but also emphasizes its practicality and operability. This approach enables students to effectively apply theoretical knowledge to real-world engineering projects.

TAFENet: A Two-Stage Attention-Based Feature-Enhancement Network for Strip Steel Surface Defect Detection

Strip steel serves as a crucial raw material in numerous industries, including aircraft and automobile manufacturing. Surface defects in strip steel can degrade the performance, quality, and appearance of industrial steel products. Detecting surface defects in steel strip products is challenging due to the low contrast between defects and background, small defect targets, as well as significant variations in defect sizes. To address these challenges, a two-stage attention-based feature-enhancement network (TAFENet) is proposed, wherein the first-stage feature-enhancement procedure utilizes an attentional convolutional fusion module with convolution to combine all four-level features and then strengthens the features of different levels via a residual spatial-channel attention connection module (RSC). The second-stage feature-enhancement procedure combines three-level features using an attentional self-attention fusion module and then strengthens the features using a RSC attention module. Experiments on the NEU-DET and GC10-DET datasets demonstrated that the proposed method significantly improved detection accuracy, thereby confirming the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed method.

A lightweight parallel attention residual network for tile defect recognition

In modern industrial production, permanent magnet motors are an indispensable part of industrial manufacturing. The quality of the magnetic tiles directly affects the working performance of the permanent magnet motors, making the detection of defects on the surface of magnetic tiles critically important. However, due to the small size of defects on the tile image and the reflectivity of the defective surface, the details of image characteristics are not prominently acquired.These problems bring a lot of difficulties for the recognition of magnetic tile defects. In this paper, a magnetic tile defect detection method is proposed for the probAlems of unclear image features and small defects. First, the image is processed using linear variation to enhance the image detail features. Then, by introducing the inverted bottleneck block structure in MobileNetV2, the Attention Parallel Residual Convolution Block (APR) is proposed, and the Lightweight Parallel Attention Residual Network (LPAR-Net) is built. In APR Block, 7 × 7 convolution is introduced so that the model can extract spatial features from a larger range, and weighted fusion of input images by residual structure. In addition, in this paper, CBAM is improved, split into two parts and inserted into APR Block. Finally, the mainstream image classification models and the LPAR-Net proposed in this paper are used for comparison, respectively. The experimental results show that the method achieves 93.63% accuracy on the adopted dataset, which is better than the existing mainstream image classification network models DenseNet, MobileNet, ConvNext and so on. In addition, this paper introduces a strip steel surface defect dataset and compares it with the above image classification model, which verifies that the detection method proposed in this paper still has strong recognition capability.

Resilient machine learning for steel surface defect detection based on lightweight convolution

AbstractSteel, as a crucial material extensively used in various fields, has a critical impact on the determination of the stability and reliability of engineering structures. Nevertheless, because of inevitable factors in manufacturing, transportation, and other processes, steel may exhibit various surface defects during production and handling. To address these defects, the investigation puts forward a resilient machine-learning method for steel surface defect detection based on lightweight convolution. First, to reduce redundant features, complexity, and computational cost, the Spatial and Channel Reconstruction Convolution (ScConv) module is added before the Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast (SPPF) within the YOLOv8n’s backbone network. Second, in the Neck layer, lightweight convolution GSConv is used to replace the convolutional modules, and the efficient cross-stage partial network (CSP) module, VoV-GSCSP is substituted for the C2f module to alleviate the model burden while maintaining accuracy. Then, to focus on important information related to the current task, the Coordinate Attention module is added to the Neck layer. Finally, the activation function of YOLOv8n has been swapped for the Leaky Rectified Linear Unit (LeakyReLU) to effectively address issues such as gradient vanishing and overfitting. The method achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 77.7% on the NEU-DET dataset, which is an improvement of 4.7% over the original YOLOv8n. Additionally, the frames per second (FPS) reached 17.36 f/s, representing a 5.79 f/s increase compared to the original YOLOv8n. On the GC10-DET dataset, mAP improves by 5.5%, with a FPS of 15.63 f/s. A plethora of experimentation on both datasets illustrates the method’s robustness, meeting the precision criteria for detecting metal defects.

A Global Feature Reused Network for Defect Detection in Steel Images

Abstract Accurate detection of surface defects for steel is essential to improve surface quality and service life. Deep learning (DL) used in steel surface defect detection can solve the problems of low efficiency and poor accuracy of traditional manual detection. The classic YOLOv5 as a DL method is used to accomplish defect detection tasks without attention mechanisms, resulting in a loss of global information. Besides, it is difficult to complete complex network detection tasks with low-configuration hardware, especially for surface defects with complex defect types and variable defect sizes. To solve these issues, this paper introduces an improved global feature reuse and hardware-aware YOLOv5 by using BoTNet, RepGhost, and EfficientRep model (BGE-YOLOv5). The multi-head self-attention layer is used to obtain global information and only part of the convolutional layers is replaced to avoid the excessive computational cost. The RepGhost model is introduced to extract the remaining feature information for feature reuse. EfficientRep is used to replace the original structure to achieve hardware-aware and to balance the detection veracity and efficiency. The distance IOU is replaced by SCYLLA-IOU to accelerate the iteration and improve stability. The results of the framework on the surface defect database (NEU-DET) show that BGE-YOLOv5 achieves a mean average precision of 79.5%, which is 10.3% greater than the baseline. The proposed BGE-YOLOv5 has a better performance in steel surface defect detection.