A Cross-Scale Feature Fusion Method for Effectively Enhancing Small Object Detection Performance

Deep learning-based industrial product surface defect detection methods are replacing manual inspection, while the issue of small object detection remains a key challenge in the current field of surface defect detection. The feature pyramid structures demonstrate great potential in improving the performance of small object detection and are one of the important current research directions. Nevertheless, traditional feature pyramid networks still suffer from problems such as imprecise focus on key features, insufficient feature discrimination capabilities, and weak correlations between features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a plug-and-play guided focus feature pyramid network, named GF-FPN. Built on the foundation of FPN, this network is designed with a bottom-up guided aggregation network (GFN): through a lightweight pyramidal attention module (LPAM), star operation, and residual connections, it establishes correlations between objects and local contextual information, as well as between shallow-level details and deep-level semantic features. This enables the feature pyramid network to focus on key features, enhance the ability to distinguish between objects and backgrounds, and thereby improve the model’s small object detection performance. Experimental results on the self-built TinyIndus dataset and NEU-DET demonstrate that the detection model based on GF-FPN exhibits more competitive advantages in object detection compared to existing models.