Surface defect detection method of aluminium alloy castings based on data enhancement and CRT‐DETR

The surface quality of aluminium alloy castings is crucial to quality control. Aiming to address the challenges of limited samples and extensive computation in deep learning‐based surface defect detection for aluminium alloy castings, this paper proposes a surface defect detection method based on data enhancement and the Casting Real‐Time DEtection TRansformer. First, to tackle the issue of small sample sizes and uneven distribution in surface defect data sets of aluminium alloy castings, ECA‐MetaAconC Deep Convolution Generative Adversarial Networks is proposed for generating defects with fewer samples and employ the image augmentation (IMGAUG) library for sample enhancement. Second, building upon the Real‐Time DEtection TRansformer (RT‐DETR), a lightweight partial‐rep convolution is designed to decrease the network's parameter count. Simultaneously, the Deformable attention module and the DRBC3 module are introduced to enhance the neck network, thereby improving the model's capability to capture information and enhancing its detection performance. Compared to RT‐DETR, this method reduces the number of model parameters by 38.7%, increases mAP by 1.5%, and achieves a frame rate that is 1.58 times higher than the original model. The experimental results demonstrate that this method can effectively and accurately detect surface defects in aluminium alloy castings, satisfying industrial requirements. The surface quality of aluminium alloy castings is very important in quality control. Aiming at the problems of few samples, large amount of calculation, and poor real‐time performance in the surface defect detection method of aluminium alloy castings based on deep learning, here a surface defect detection method based on data enhancement and Casting Real‐Time DEtection TRansformer is designed.