MSFT-YOLO: Improved YOLOv5 Based on Transformer for Detecting Defects of Steel Surface

With the development of artificial intelligence technology and the popularity of intelligent production projects, intelligent inspection systems have gradually become a hot topic in the industrial field. As a fundamental problem in the field of computer vision, how to achieve object detection in the industry while taking into account the accuracy and real-time detection is an important challenge in the development of intelligent detection systems. The detection of defects on steel surfaces is an important application of object detection in the industry. Correct and fast detection of surface defects can greatly improve productivity and product quality. To this end, this paper introduces the MSFT-YOLO model, which is improved based on the one-stage detector. The MSFT-YOLO model is proposed for the industrial scenario in which the image background interference is great, the defect category is easily confused, the defect scale changes a great deal, and the detection results of small defects are poor. By adding the TRANS module, which is designed based on Transformer, to the backbone and detection headers, the features can be combined with global information. The fusion of features at different scales by combining multi-scale feature fusion structures enhances the dynamic adjustment of the detector to objects at different scales. To further improve the performance of MSFT-YOLO, we also introduce plenty of effective strategies, such as data augmentation and multi-step training methods. The test results on the NEU-DET dataset show that MSPF-YOLO can achieve real-time detection, and the average detection accuracy of MSFT-YOLO is 75.2, improving about 7% compared to the baseline model (YOLOv5) and 18% compared to Faster R-CNN, which is advantageous and inspiring.