Research on oriented surface defect detection in the aircraft skin‐coating process based on an attention detector

Aircraft coating process has been an important part in manufacturing process of modern aviation products. For coating defect detection, the manual observation with naked eyes is usually utilized, which leads to low production efficiency. In this paper, the authors propose the improved YOLOv5‐OBB with the channel‐spatial attention block (CSAB), feature pyramid non‐local module (FPNM) and structured sparsity slimming criterion (SSSC). The CSAB can pay more attention to effective channel information features from the channel dimension and the target information area from the spatial dimension. The effective non‐local module called FPNM is proposed to further improve the detection accuracy. The authors utilize the oriented bounding boxes (OBB) to reduce redundant background information for coating defect detection. In addition, the SSSC is proposed to achieve network slimming and trade‐off between the efficiency and accuracy. The experimental results on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the authors’ scheme, which achieves superior performance. This paper proposes the channel‐spatial attention block (CSAB), feature pyramid non‐local module (FPNM) and structured sparsity slimming criterion (SSSC) for oriented surface defect detection in the aircraft skin coating. The CSAB can pay more attention to effective channel information features from the channel dimension and the target information area from the spatial dimension. The effective non‐local module called FPNM is proposed to further improve the detection accuracy. The SSSC is proposed to achieve network slimming and trade‐off between the efficiency and accuracy. The experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the authors’ scheme, which achieves superior performance.