YOLO-RFF: An Industrial Defect Detection Method Based on Expanded Field of Feeling and Feature Fusion

Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, high false detection rate, and poor real-time performance of current industrial defect detection methods, this paper proposes an industrial defect detection method based on an expanded perceptual field and feature fusion for practical industrial applications. First, to improve the real-time performance of the network, the original network structure is enhanced by using depth-separable convolution to reduce the computation while ensuring the detection accuracy, and the critical information extraction from the feature map is enhanced by using MECA (More Efficient Channel Attention) attention to the detection network. To reduce the loss of small target detail information caused by the pooling operation, the ASPF (Atrous Spatial Pyramid Fast) module is constructed using dilate convolution with different void rates to extract more contextual information. Secondly, a new feature fusion method is proposed to fuse more detailed information by introducing a shallower feature map and using a dense multiscale weighting method to improve detection accuracy. Finally, in the model optimization process, the K-means++ algorithm is used to reconstruct the prediction frame to speed up the model’s convergence and verify the effectiveness of the combination of the Mish activation function and the SIoU loss function. The NEU-DET steel dataset and PCB dataset is used to test the effectiveness of the proposed model, and compared to the original YOLOv5s, our method in terms of mAP metrics by 6.5% and 1.4%, and in F1 by 5.74% and 1.33%, enabling fast detection of industrial surface defects to meet the needs of real industry.