A Surface Defect Detection Method for Cold-rolled Strip Steel Based on Improved YOLOv8

Cold-rolled strip steel has excellent mechanical properties, and it is widely used in the fields such as automotive manufacturing, construction industry, aircraft manufacturing and electronic product manufacturing. However, many different processing defects occur in the manufacturing process of cold-rolled strip steel, and this article proposes a visual detection method based on YOLOv8 to identify the surface defects on cold-rolled strip steel more accurately. Firstly, several common types of defects in cold-rolled strip steel were analyzed. Then, in order to enrich the dataset for subsequent detection, wavelet transform was used for filtering, denoising, and canny edge detection in the image processing stage for obtaining the clearer input model image with the more prominent graphics. Lastly, the CA attention mechanism was added into the YOLOv8 which is useful to improve the features recognition ability of the model, at the same time, the original standard convolution was replaced by DCS convolution and the loss function was optimized which is useful to get the lightweight models. The improved YOLOv8 model was validated on the NEU-DET dataset, the overall detection performance of the model such as the recall, the accuracy, and the average precision has significantly improved.