STMS-YOLOv5: A Lightweight Algorithm for Gear Surface Defect Detection

Most deep-learning-based object detection algorithms exhibit low speeds and accuracy in gear surface defect detection due to their high computational costs and complex structures. To solve this problem, a lightweight model for gear surface defect detection, namely STMS-YOLOv5, is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the ShuffleNetv2 module is employed as the backbone to reduce the giga floating-point operations per second and the number of parameters. Secondly, transposed convolution upsampling is used to enhance the learning capability of the network. Thirdly, the max efficient channel attention mechanism is embedded in the neck to compensate for the accuracy loss caused by the lightweight backbone. Finally, the SIOU_Loss is adopted as the bounding box regression loss function in the prediction part to speed up the model convergence. Experiments show that STMS-YOLOv5 achieves frames per second of 130.4 and 133.5 on the gear and NEU-DET steel surface defect datasets, respectively. The number of parameters and GFLOPs are reduced by 44.4% and 50.31%, respectively, while the mAP@0.5 reaches 98.6% and 73.5%, respectively. Extensive ablation and comparative experiments validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of the model in industrial defect detection.