YOLO_Bolt: a lightweight network model for bolt detection

Accurate, fast, and intelligent workpiece identification is of great significance to industrial production. To cope with the limited hardware resources of factory equipment, we have made lightweight improvements based on You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) and proposed a lightweight YOLO named YOLO_Bolt. First, ghost bottleneck lightweight deep convolution is added to the backbone module and neck module of the YOLOv5 detection algorithm to reduce the model volume. Second, the asymptotic feature pyramid network is added to enhance the feature utilization ability, suppress interference information, and improve detection accuracy. Finally, the relationship between the loss function and the decoupling head structure was focused on, and the number of decoupling head layers was redesigned according to different tasks to further improve the detection accuracy of the workpiece detection model. We conducted experimental verification on the MSCOCO 2017 dataset and the homemade bolt dataset. The experimental results show that compared with YOLOv5s, the number of model parameters is only 6.8 M, which is half that of the original model. On the MSCOCO 2017 dataset, the mAP increased by 2.4%. FPS increased by 104 frames/s. On the homemade dataset, the mAP 0.5 increased by 4.2%, and our proposed method is 1.2% higher than the latest YOLOv8s. The improved network can provide effective auxiliary technical support for workpiece detection.