An weak surface defect inspection approach using efficient multi-scale attention and space-to-depth convolution network

In the field of precision manufacturing, machine vision technology is gradually replacing traditional manual inspection methods as a key technology to improve product quality. In precision manufacturing companies, weak defects on the product surface are unacceptable. However, existing defect detection methods rarely focus on the weak surface defect detection task. To address this challenge, we acquire and build a dataset called USBDET, which contains weak defect samples. Then, we propose an innovative lightweight deep learning model, SDIA-net, which integrates SPD-Conv, Dysample technique, and attention mechanism-iRMA, to improve the recognition and localization of weak defects effectively. On the USB-DET dataset, SDIA-net achieves 55.1% mAP, which is 3.2% higher than the existing SOTA models. The computational efficiency is 205.1 FPS, which satisfies real-time demands. SDIA-net's advantages make it well-suited for deployment in resource-limited precision manufacturing environments, providing an effective technical solution for product surface quality control with significant practical application value.