DLF-YOLO: A Dynamic Synergy Attention-Guided Lightweight Framework for Few-Shot Clothing Trademark Defect Detection

To address key challenges in clothing trademark quality inspection—namely, insufficient defect samples, unstable performance in complex industrial environments, and low detection efficiency—this paper proposes DLF-YOLO, an enhanced YOLOv11-based model optimized for industrial deployment. To mitigate the problem of limited annotated data, an unsupervised generative network, CycleGAN, is employed to synthesize rare defect patterns and simulate diverse environmental conditions (e.g., rotation, noise, and contrast variations), thereby improving data diversity and model generalization. To reduce the impact of industrial noise, a novel multi-scale dynamic synergy attention (MDSA) attention mechanism is introduced, which utilizes dual attention in both channel and spatial dimensions to focus more accurately on key regions of the trademark, effectively suppressing false detections caused by lighting variations and fabric textures. Furthermore, the high-level selective feature pyramid network (HS-FPN) module is adopted to make the neck structure more lightweight, where the feature selection sub-module enhances the perception of fine edge defects, while the feature fusion sub-module achieves a balance between model lightweighting and detection accuracy through the aggregation of hierarchical multi-scale context information. In the backbone, DWConv replaces standard convolutions before the C3k2 module to reduce computational complexity, and HetConv is integrated into the C3k2 module to simultaneously reduce computational cost and enhance feature extraction capabilities, achieving the goal of maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results on a custom-built dataset demonstrate that DLF-YOLO achieves an [email protected]:0.95 of 80.2%, with a 49.6% reduction in parameters and a 25.6% reduction in computational load compared to the original YOLOv11. These results highlight the potential of DLF-YOLO as a scalable and efficient solution for lightweight, industrial-grade defect detection in clothing trademarks.