YOLO-FGD: a fast lightweight PCB defect method based on FasterNet and the Gather-and-Distribute mechanism

With the rapid expansion of the electronics industry, the demand for high-quality printed circuit boards has surged. However, existing PCB defect detection methods suffer from various limitations, such as slow speeds, low accuracy, and restricted detection scope, often leading to false positives and negatives. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents YOLO-FGD, a novel detection model. YOLO-FGD replaces YOLOv5’s backbone network with FasterNet, significantly accelerating feature extraction. The Neck section adopts the Gather-and-Distribute mechanism, which enhances multiscale feature fusion for small targets through convolution and self-attention mechanisms. Integration of the C3_Faster feature extraction module effectively reduces the number of parameters and the number of FLOPs, accelerating the computations. Experiments on the PCB-DATASETS dataset show promising results: the mean average precision50 reaches 98.8%, the mean average precision50–95 reaches 57.2%, the computational load is reduced to 11.5 GFLOPs, and the model size is only 12.6 MB, meeting lightweight standards. These findings underscore the effectiveness of YOLO-FGD in efficiently detecting PCB defects, providing robust support for electronic manufacturing quality control.