EAS-DETR: An Enhanced Real-Time Transformer with Sparse Attention and Global Context for PCB Defect Inspection

Printed circuit board (PCB) defect inspection is critical for ensuring product reliability, yet it remains challenging due to the microscopic scale of defects and complex background patterns. To improve the localization of fine anomalies, this paper proposes EAS-DETR, an efficient and highly sensitive real-time end-to-end detector. First, we reconstruct the feature extraction backbone by introducing a novel C2f-EC module, which jointly models local textures and global structural dependencies. Second, an Adaptive Sparse Attention-based Intra-scale Feature Interaction (ASAFI) module is proposed to suppress background noise and focus the network’s attention on sparse defect regions. Finally, an optimized feature pyramid network, SGO-FPN, is designed to mitigate cross-scale feature misalignment and preserve high-resolution spatial details for small object localization. Experiments demonstrate that EAS-DETR achieves an [email protected] of 93.0% and a 91.9% recall on a multi-source PCB dataset. The model outperforms mainstream YOLO variants and baseline RT-DETR models while maintaining a moderate parameter count of 14.6M and achieving a real-time inference speed of over 70 FPS. Furthermore, cross-domain validations on public benchmarks confirm its robust generalization capability for complex tiny object detection tasks.