Research on Surface Defect Detection of Strip Steel Based on Improved YOLOv7

Surface defect detection of strip steel is an important guarantee for improving the production quality of strip steel. However, due to the diverse types, scales, and texture structures of surface defects on strip steel, as well as the irregular distribution of defects, it is difficult to achieve rapid and accurate detection of strip steel surface defects with existing methods. This article proposes a real-time and high-precision surface defect detection algorithm for strip steel based on YOLOv7. Firstly, Partial Conv is used to replace the conventional convolution blocks of the backbone network to reduce the size of the network model and improve the speed of detection; Secondly, The CA attention mechanism module is added to the ELAN module to enhance the ability of the network to extract detect features and improve the effectiveness of detect detection in complex environments; Finally, The SPD convolution module is introduced at the output end to improve the detection performance of small targets with surface defects on steel. The experimental results on the NEU-DET dataset indicate that the mean average accuracy (mAP@IoU = 0.5) is 80.4%, which is 4.0% higher than the baseline network. The number of parameters is reduced by 8.9%, and the computational load is reduced by 21.9% (GFLOPs). The detection speed reaches 90.9 FPS, which can well meet the requirements of real-time detection.