An efficient re-parameterization feature pyramid network on YOLOv8 to the detection of steel surface defect

In the field of steel production, the detection of steel surface defects is one of the most important guarantees for the quality of steel production. In the process of defect detection, there are problems regarding the noise of the acquisition background, the scale of defects, and the detection speed. At present, in the face of complex steel surface defects, realizing efficient real-time steel surface defect detection has become a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient real-time defect detection method, LDE-YOLO, based on YOLOv8. First, we propose a lightweight multi-scale feature extraction module, LighterMSMC, which not only achieves a lightweight backbone network, but also effectively guarantees the long range dependence of the features, so as to realize multi-scale feature extraction more efficiently. Secondly, we propose lightweight re-parameterized feature pyramid, DE-FPN, in which the sparse patterns of the overall features and the detailed features of the local features are efficiently captured by the DE-Block, and then efficiently fused by the PAN feature fusion structure. Finally, we propose Efficient Head, which lightens the model by group convolution while its improves the diagonal correlation of the feature maps on some specific datasets, thus enhancing the detection performance. Our proposed LDE-YOLO obtains 80.8 mAP and 75.5 FPS on NEU-DET , 80.5 mAP and 75.5 FPS on GC10-DET. It obtains 2.5 mAP and 4.7 mAP enhancement compared to the baseline model, and the detection speed is also improved by 10.4 FPS, while in terms of the number of floating point operations and parameters of the model reduced by 60.2% and 49.1%, which is sufficient to illustrate its lightweight effectiveness and realize an efficient real-time steel surface defect detection model.