Development of an Improved YOLOv7-Based Model for Detecting Defects on Strip Steel Surfaces

The detection of defects on the surface is of great importance for both the production and the application of strip steel. In order to detect the defects accurately, an improved YOLOv7-based model for detecting strip steel surface defects is developed. To enhances the ability of the model to extract features and identify small features, the ConvNeXt module is introduced to the backbone network structure, and the attention mechanism is embedded in the pooling module. To reduce the size and improves the inference speed of the model, an improved C3 module was used to replace the ELAN module in the head. The experimental results show that, compared with the original models, the mAP of the proposed model reached 82.9% and improved by 6.6%. The proposed model can satisfy the need for accurate detection and identification of strip steel surface defects.