YOLOv8-SC: improving the YOLOv8 network for real-time detection of automotive coated surface defects

The detection of defects on automotive coated surfaces is of paramount importance to ensure the quality of automotive appearance. However, due to the challenges posed by the lack of sufficient samples of product-specific coated defects, the uneven number of species, and the difficulty of detecting defects in small targets due to the complex background of the body surface. The detection of defects on automotive coated surfaces still relies on experienced manual labor to a significant extent. To address these issues, Poisson fusion is employed to enhance the data for generating defect images, thereby mitigating the limitations of insufficient coated defect samples and an imbalanced distribution of defect species. Based on this, a new YOLOv8-SC defect detection model is proposed, in which the C2f-Star is used to replace the original C2f structure. This aims to improve the model’s ability to extract defects of varying sizes in complex backgrounds, while reducing the number of model parameters and the amount of computation. The content-guided attention fusion (CGAFusion) module, situated before each detection head of the model, has been designed to enhance the model’s capacity to extract defects of varying sizes and complexity. This is achieved through the adaptive fusion of low-level and high-level features. The proposed model’s superiority in terms of detection metrics has been demonstrated through the use of example validation. The experiments were conducted on the enterprise dataset CPD-DET and the public dataset NEU-DET. The results demonstrated that the defective image generation and data enhancement method could significantly improve detection performance and have good generalization. The proposed YOLOv8-SC reduces the model parameters by 12.2% compared to the normal model. Additionally, the mean average precision (mAP) at 50% and 50%-95% thresholds are enhanced by 4.7% and 2.3%, respectively. Furthermore, the accuracy of the model exhibits a discernible positive growth trend with an increase in the sample set size. The design of an automotive coated surface defect detection system is presented at last. When deployed in industrial settings, this system can facilitate the intelligent detection of coated defects. © 2025 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved.