A Lightweight TA-YOLOv8 Method for the Spot Weld Surface Anomaly Detection of Body in White

The deep learning architecture YOLO (You Only Look Once) has demonstrated its superior visual detection performance in various computer vision tasks and has been widely applied in the field of automatic surface defect detection. In this paper, we propose a lightweight YOLOv8-based method for the quality inspection of car body welding spots. We developed a TA-YOLOv8 network structure which has an improved Task-Aligned (TA) head detection, designed to handle a small sample size, imbalanced positive and negative samples, and high-noise characteristics of Body-in-White welding spot data. By learning with fewer parameters, the model achieves more efficient and accurate classification. Additionally, our algorithm framework can perform anomaly segmentation and classification on our open-world raw datasets obtained from actual production environments. The experimental results show that the lightweight module improves the processing speed by an average of 2.8%, with increases in detection the mAP@50-95 and recall rate of 1.35% and 0.1226, respectively.