An enhanced YOLOv8n object detector for synthetic diamond quality evaluation

To address the need for automated sorting of synthetic diamonds based on quality in manufacturing enterprises, this study developed a dedicated dataset and an enhanced YOLOv8n model for synthetic diamonds detection and quality evaluation, named YOLOv8n-adamas. We redesigned the backbone network to improve feature extraction capabilities and introduced a dynamic detection head based on attention mechanisms to further enhance model performance. Experimental results show that on synthetic diamonds dataset, YOLOv8n-adamas achieved a 4.0% improvement in precision (P), a 2.7% increase in recall (R), and improvements of 1.5% and 1.3% in mean average precisions at 50% and 95% Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds (mAP50 and mAP95) compared to YOLOv8. Furthermore, YOLOv8n-adamas also outperforms other commonly used, high-performing models in various metrics on this dataset, offering effective technical support for the automated quality-based sorting of synthetic diamonds.