Lightweight bobbin yarn detection model for auto-coner with yarn bank

The automated replacement of empty tubes in the yarn bank is a critical step in the process of automatic winding machines with yarn banks, as the real-time detection of depleted yarn on spools and accurate positioning of empty tubes directly impact the production efficiency of winding machines. Addressing the shortcomings of traditional methods, such as poor adaptability and low sensitivity in optical and visual tube detection, and aiming to reduce the computational and detection time costs introduced by neural networks, this paper proposes a lightweight yarn spool detection model based on YOLOv8. The model utilizes Darknet-53 as the backbone network, and due to the dense spatial distribution of yarn spool targets, it incorporates large selective kernel units to enhance the recognition and positioning of dense targets. To address the issue of excessive focus on local features by convolutional neural networks, a bi-level routing attention mechanism is introduced to capture long-distance dependencies dynamically. Furthermore, to balance accuracy and detection speed, a FasterNeck is constructed as the neck network, replacing the original convolutional blocks with Ghost convolutions and integrating with FasterNet. This design minimizes the sacrifice of detection accuracy while achieving a significant improvement in inference speed. Lastly, the model employs weighted IoU with a dynamic focusing mechanism as the bounding box loss function. Experimental results on a custom yarn spool dataset demonstrate a notable improvement over the baseline model, with a high-confidence mAP of 94.2% and a compact weight size of only 4.9 MB. The detection speed reaches 223FPS, meeting the requirements for industrial deployment and real-time detection.