YOLO-LFPD: A Lightweight Method for Strip Surface Defect Detection

Strip steel surface defect recognition research has important research significance in industrial production. Aiming at the problems of defect feature extraction, slow detection speed, and insufficient datasets, YOLOv5 is improved on the basis of YOLOv5, and the YOLO-LFPD (lightweight fine particle detection) model is proposed. By introducing the RepVGG (Re-param VGG) module, the robustness of the model is enhanced, and the expressive ability of the model is improved. FasterNet is used to replace the backbone network, which ensures accuracy and accelerates the inference speed, making the model more suitable for real-time monitoring. The use of pruning, a GA genetic algorithm with OTA loss function, further reduces the model size while better learning the strip steel defect feature information, thus improving the generalisation ability and accuracy of the model. The experimental results show that the introduction of the RepVGG module and the use of FasterNet can well improve the model performance, with a reduction of 48% in the number of parameters, a reduction of 13% in the number of GFLOPs, an inference time of 77% of the original, and an optimal accuracy compared with the network models in recent years. The experimental results on the NEU-DET dataset show that the accuracy of YOLO-LFPD is improved by 3% to 81.2%, which is better than other models, and provides new ideas and references for the lightweight strip steel surface defect detection scenarios and application deployment.