Research on steel surface defect detection system based on YOLOv5s-SE-CA model and BEMD image enhancement

The nondestructive testing capability of steel surface defects has a significant impact on quality of industrial production. However, the single-stage detection network YOLOv5s model for steel surface defect detection is of insufficient feature extraction ability and susceptibility to noise interference in extracting surface defect images. Accordingly, a steel surface defect detection system based on YOLOv5s-SE-CA model and bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) image enhancement is proposed. Firstly, the BEMD is used for image threshold denoising to improve the quality of surface defect images and achieve preprocessing of the dataset. Secondly, the squeeze and excitation network (SENet) attention mechanism is introduced into the backbone network of YOLOv5s model to adaptively adjust weights of each feature channel. Meanwhile, the coordinate attention (CA) attention mechanism is integrated to improve network model’s ability to focus on surface defects. Therefore, the YOLOv5s-SE-CA model is designed to enhance detection capability of steel surface defects. Experimental verification was carried out using the NEU-DET noisy dataset with specific evaluation indicators of image enhancement detection system. Results showed the proposed system has superior performance when compared to traditional models trained on noisy and denoising datasets and achieved more accurate detection of surface defects in steel.