ASDS-you only look once version 8: A real-time segmentation method for cross-scale prefabricated laminated slab components

Prefabricated laminated slabs (PLS) are widely used globally due to their convenience. However, this convenience often comes with challenges in quality control. Although factories currently conduct quality inspections of PLS component arrangements, these inspections mainly rely on manual visual detection methods, which are highly inefficient. This paper proposes an improved You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) instance segmentation network for PLS inspection. To address the difficulties in detecting PLS components, we introduced multilevel auxiliary information in tandem with the main branch, designed an additional small-target feature fusion layer and segmentation header, and enhanced the original YOLOv8. These improvements allow for the extraction and segmentation of cross-scale information, reducing information gradient loss. However, this approach generates excessive cross-scale information, requiring a balance between the fusion weights of large-scale and small-scale information. To achieve this, we introduced a multilevel feature fusion module Semantic and Detail Infusion (SDI) and a dynamic upsampling module (Dysample). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved a mean average precision (mAP₅₀) of 93.9 % and a detection speed of 108.7 Frames Per Second. Additionally, to support future research and applications, our method provides code that allows for direct derivation of the coordinates of each component class relative to the floor slab. Thus, the proposed detection method holds significant practical application value.