DAER-YOLO: Defect-Aware and Edge-Reconstruction Enhanced YOLO for Surface Defect Detection of Varistors

Varistors are critical overvoltage protection components in modern power electronic systems. They effectively absorb and dissipate surge energy to ensure the safe and stable operation of electrical equipment. However, surface defects can lead to substandard performance or even trigger equipment failure, compromising overall system stability. Therefore, high-precision surface defect detection is essential for quality assurance. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight model termed Defect-Aware and Edge-Reconstruction Enhanced YOLO (DAER-YOLO) for efficient varistor inspection. First, we construct a C3k2-based defect-aware enhancement module (C3k2-iEMA). This module tackles the difficulty of extracting features from small or morphologically complex defects. By integrating multi-scale feature extraction, an attention mechanism, and efficient nonlinear mapping, it strengthens the perception of defect details. Second, to enhance the reconstruction capability for edge damage and small-object defects, we introduce the Efficient Up-Convolution Block (EUCB). This block improves multi-level feature fusion and generates clearer enhanced feature maps. Based on these improvements, DAER-YOLO outperforms the YOLOv11n baseline on a custom varistor dataset, with mAP@50 and mAP@50:95 increasing by 1.6% and 2.3%, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the model effectively improves detection accuracy while exhibiting significant potential for real-time industrial applications.