ADFE-DET: An Adaptive Dynamic Feature Enhancement Algorithm for Weld Defect Detection

Welding is a critical joining process in modern manufacturing, with defects contributing to 50–80% of structural failures. Traditional inspection methods are often inefficient, subjective, and inconsistent. To address challenges in weld defect detection—including scale variation, morphological complexity, low contrast, and sample imbalance—this paper proposes ADFE-DET, an adaptive dynamic feature enhancement algorithm. The approach introduces three core innovations: the Dynamic Selection Cross-stage Cascade Feature Block (DSCFBlock) captures fine texture features via edge-preserving dynamic selection attention; the Adaptive Hierarchical Spatial Feature Pyramid Network (AHSFPN) achieves adaptive multi-scale feature integration through directional channel attention and hierarchical fusion; and the Multi-Directional Differential Lightweight Head (MDDLH) enables precise defect localization via multi-directional differential convolution while maintaining a lightweight architecture. Experiments on three public datasets (Weld-DET, NEU-DET, PKU-Market-PCB) show that ADFE-DET improves mAP50 by 2.16%, 2.73%, and 1.81%, respectively, over baseline YOLOv11n, while reducing parameters by 34.1%, computational complexity by 4.6%, and achieving 105 FPS inference speed. The results demonstrate that ADFE-DET provides an effective and practical solution for intelligent industrial weld quality inspection.