Surface defect detection of sawn timbers based on efficient multilevel feature integration

Abstract Surface defect detection of sawn timber is a critical task to ensure the quality of wooden products. Current methods have challenges in considering detection accuracy and speed simultaneously, due to the complexity of defects and the massive length of sawn timbers. Specifically, there are scale variation, large intraclass difference and high interclass similarity in the defects, which reduce the detection accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient multilevel-feature integration network (EMINet) based on YOLOv5s. To obtain discriminative features of defects, the cross fusion module (CFM) is proposed to fully integrate the multilevel features of backbone. In the CFM, the local information aggregation is designed to enrich the detailed information of high-level features, and the global information aggregation is designed to enhance the semantic information of low-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EMINet achieves better accuracy with fast speed compared with the state-of-the-art methods.