WD-YOLO: A More Accurate YOLO for Defect Detection in Weld X-ray Images

X-ray images are an important industrial non-destructive testing method. However, the contrast of some weld seam images is low, and the shapes and sizes of defects vary greatly, which makes it very difficult to detect defects in weld seams. In this paper, we propose a gray value curve enhancement (GCE) module and a model specifically designed for weld defect detection, namely WD-YOLO. The GCE module can improve image contrast to make detection easier. WD-YOLO adopts feature pyramid and path aggregation designs. In particular, we propose the NeXt backbone for extraction and fusion of image features. In the YOLO head, we added a dual attention mechanism to enable the model to better distinguish between foreground and background areas. Experimental results show that our model achieves a satisfactory balance between performance and accuracy. Our model achieved 92.6% mAP@0.5 with 98 frames per second.