Detection Transformer with Multi-Scale Fusion Attention Mechanism for Aero-Engine Turbine Blade Cast Defect Detection Considering Comprehensive Features

Casting defects in turbine blades can significantly reduce an aero-engine’s service life and cause secondary damage to the blades when exposed to harsh environments. Therefore, casting defect detection plays a crucial role in enhancing aircraft performance. Existing defect detection methods face challenges in effectively detecting multi-scale defects and handling imbalanced datasets, leading to unsatisfactory defect detection results. In this work, a novel blade defect detection method is proposed. This method is based on a detection transformer with a multi-scale fusion attention mechanism, considering comprehensive features. Firstly, a novel joint data augmentation (JDA) method is constructed to alleviate the imbalanced dataset issue by effectively increasing the number of sample data. Then, an attention-based channel-adaptive weighting (ACAW) feature enhancement module is established to fully apply complementary information among different feature channels, and further refine feature representations. Consequently, a multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) module is proposed to integrate high-dimensional semantic information and low-level representation features, enhancing multi-scale defect detection precision. Moreover, R-Focal loss is developed in an MFF attention-based DEtection TRansformer (DETR) to further solve the issue of imbalanced datasets and accelerate model convergence using the random hyper-parameters search strategy. An aero-engine turbine blade defect X-ray (ATBDX) image dataset is applied to validate the proposed method. The comparative results demonstrate that this proposed method can effectively integrate multi-scale image features and enhance multi-scale defect detection precision.