MAA-YOLOv8: enhanced steel surface defect detection through multi-head attention mechanism and lightweight feature fusion

In the process of industrial production, product defects often arise due to improper operations among other reasons, rendering the detection of such flaws an indispensable procedure. However, the vast array of defect types, coupled with their complex characteristics, poses ongoing challenges for contemporary defect detection algorithms within industrial settings. To solve this problem, the present study introduces an enhanced steel surface defect detection model based on the modified YOLOv8 algorithm—termed the MAA-YOLOv8 model—to augment the accuracy and practicality of the algorithm. Initially, a multi-head attention mechanism was incorporated into the C2f to bolster the feature extraction capabilities within the backbone network and diversify the attention maps. Secondly, in the neck structure, we design a multi-channel feature fusion module (McPAN) to solve the problem of balance between computational efficiency and the ability to capture useful features. A series of experiments conducted on the NEU-DET dataset reveal that the MAA-YOLOv8 model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 94.4\%, representing an enhancement of 11.1\% over the original YOLOv8s model. The MAA-YOLOv8 model proposed in this study substantially elevates the performance of steel surface defect detection while ensuring the speed of detection.