Metal surface defect detection using SLF-YOLO enhanced YOLOv8 model

Abstract This paper addresses the industrial demand for precision and efficiency in metal surface defect detection by proposing SLF-YOLO, a lightweight object detection model designed for resource-constrained environments. The key innovations of SLF-YOLO include a novel SC_C2f module with a channel...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yuan Liu, Yilong Liu, Xiaoyan Guo, Xi Ling, Qingyi Geng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-04-01
Series:Scientific Reports
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94936-9
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Summary:Abstract This paper addresses the industrial demand for precision and efficiency in metal surface defect detection by proposing SLF-YOLO, a lightweight object detection model designed for resource-constrained environments. The key innovations of SLF-YOLO include a novel SC_C2f module with a channel gating mechanism to enhance feature representation and regulate information flow, and a newly designed Light-SSF_Neck structure to improve multi-scale feature fusion and morphological feature extraction. Additionally, an improved FIMetal-IoU loss function is introduced to boost generalization performance, particularly for fine-grained and small-target defects. Experimental results demonstrate that SLF-YOLO achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 80.0% on the NEU-DET dataset, outperforming YOLOv8’s 75.9%. On the AL10-DET dataset, SLF-YOLO achieves a mAP of 86.8%, striking an effective balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency without increasing model complexity. Compared to other mainstream models, SLF-YOLO demonstrates strong detection accuracy while maintaining a lightweight architecture, making it highly suitable for industrial applications in metal surface defect detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/zacianfans/SLF-YOLO .
ISSN:2045-2322