Real-Time Gear Surface Defect Detection via Multi-Order Feature Aggregation and Spatial-Frequency Dual-Domain...

Gears present unique inspection challenges due to involute tooth geometries, diverse industrial interferences such as lubricant residues and metallic reflections, and defect scales spanning from micrometer-level cracks to millimeter-level fractures. To address these challenges, this article presents MPC-DETR with improved matching (DEIM), a real-time gear defect detection model that achieves an optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency through multi-order feature aggregation and dual-domain optimization. The architecture employs a multi-order gated aggregation backbone to capture minute defects within complex gear textures while maintaining computational efficiency. Subsequently, a depthwise frequency-spatial convolution module decouples defect signals from background noise via spatial-frequency collaborative processing, capitalizing on the distinct spectral characteristics inherent to industrial interference. Building upon these refined features, an efficient multi-scale fusion module leverages shared large-kernel convolutions with dynamic kernel generation, enabling precise localization across heterogeneous defect scales. Extensive evaluations on a self-constructed GEER-DET dataset demonstrate that MPC-DEIM attains 95.2% mean average precision (mAP)@0.5, surpassing the DEIM baseline by 5.1% while reducing computational costs by 56.6%, and comprehensively outperforming state-of-the-art detection transformer (DETR)-series and you-only-look-once (YOLO)-series algorithms. Validation on the public GSD dataset achieves 98.8% mAP@0.5 with a 5.5 percentage point improvement. Additional cross-dataset evaluations on NEU-DET, PCB-DET, and MS COCO further confirm broad cross-industry applicability.