NHD‐YOLO: Improved YOLOv8 using optimized neck and head for product surface defect detection with data augmentation

Surface defect detection is an essential task for ensuring the quality of products. Many excellent object detectors have been employed to detect surface defects in resent years, which has achieved outstanding success. To further improve the detection performance, a defect detector based on state‐of‐the‐art YOLOv8, named improved YOLOv8 by neck, head and data (NHD‐YOLO), is proposed. Specifically, YOLOv8 from three crucial aspects including neck, head and data is improved. First, a shortcut feature pyramid network is designed to effectively fuse features from backbone by improving the information transmission. Then, an adaptive decoupled head is proposed to alleviate the feature spatial misalignment between the classification and regression tasks. Finally, to enhance the training on small objects, a data augmentation method named selective small object copy and paste is proposed. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real‐world datasets: detection dataset from Northeastern University (NEU‐DET), printed circuit boards from Peking University (PKU‐Market‐PCB) and common objects in context (COCO). According to the results, NHD‐YOLO achieves the highest detection accuracy and exhibits outstanding inference speed and generalisation performance. To better detect surface defects, we propose a defect detector based on state‐of‐the‐art YOLOv8, named NHD‐YOLO. Specifically, we improve YOLOv8 from three crucial aspects including neck, head and data. Extensive experiments show that NHD‐YOLO achieves the highest detection accuracy and exhibits outstanding inference speed and generalisation performance.