Supervised Focused Feature Network for Steel Strip Surface Defect Detection

Accurate detection of strip steel surface defects is a critical step to ensure product quality and prevent potential safety hazards. In practical inspection scenarios, defects on strip steel surfaces typically exhibit sparse distributions, diverse morphologies, and irregular shapes, while background regions dominate the images, exhibiting highly similar texture characteristics. These characteristics pose challenges for detection algorithms to efficiently and accurately localize and extract defect features. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Supervised Focused Feature Network for steel strip surface defect detection. Firstly, the network constructs a supervised range based on annotation information and introduces supervised convolution operations in the backbone network, limiting feature extraction within the supervised range to improve feature learning effectiveness. Secondly, a supervised deformable convolution layer is designed to achieve adaptive feature extraction within the supervised range, enhancing the detection capability for irregularly shaped defects. Finally, a supervised region proposal strategy is proposed to optimize the sample allocation process using the supervised range, improving the quality of candidate regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 81.2% on the NEU-DET dataset and 72.5% mAP on the GC10-DET dataset. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each proposed module to feature extraction efficiency and detection accuracy. Results indicate that the proposed network effectively enhances the efficiency of sparse defect feature extraction and improves detection accuracy.