Cross-domain fine grained strip steel defect detection method based on semi-supervised learning and Multi-head Self Attention coordination

The identification of steel strip defects plays a pivotal role in assessing steel quality and advancing production technology. However, the majority of intelligent defect recognition algorithms for steel strips, based on deep learning, primarily focus on supervised learning. These methods depend on a multitude of training samples, incurring additional manual labelling costs, and exhibit low recognition efficiency. In contrast to supervised learning, we integrate the fine-grained characteristics of strip defects. We propose a cross-domain, fine-grained strip defect detection method based on semi-supervised learning and Multi-head self-attention coordination, along with an improvement strategy, resulting in a novel network structure: Multi-head Self Attention and Semi-supervised collaborative detection network (MSD Net). This method initiates the cross-domain migration of defect samples through Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks (Cycle GAN), creating new semi-supervised training samples from source domain and target domain data to enhance data distribution diversity. The detection model is then constructed leveraging the advantages of Multi-head Self Attention (MSA) in augmenting the global receptive field of feature extraction. The proposed semi-supervised learning method employs a pseudo-label allocation strategy to guide the model in fully utilizing the distribution fitting of unlabeled samples. This allows the deep neural network to learn a more comprehensive multivariate data distribution within the training set, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of the semi-supervised model. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset for steel strip defect detection demonstrate that the cross-domain semi-supervised method achieves a test accuracy of 96.1 % on mAP^@0.5, surpassing the supervised baseline model by 4.8 %. Our method also outperforms the baseline supervised model in the accuracy of small target recognition on PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets. Additionally, we have implemented a strip defect detection system based on edge computing for real-time deployment of the proposed algorithm. Testing in an actual industrial setting further validates the efficacy of our proposed method in practical applications. Our work encourages further exploration, the task of public datasets can be obtained at https://github.com/songzhiweiknight/NEU-DET-Datasets.git.