MACN: A cascade defect detection for complex background based on mixture attention mechanism

Defect detection in complex background is a critical issue. To address this issue, this paper proposes the mixture attention mechanism cascade network, in which the new channel attention network is linked with the spatial attention network to create an effective mixed attention network that takes advantage of their respective advantages, adaptively suppresses background noise, and highlights defect features. To ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of effective mixed attention network, the new channel attention network splices the output features of the global average pooling layer and the global maximum pooling layer and then sends the spliced features into a shared network, which is a one‐dimensional convolutional network, and uses cross‐channel interaction for fusion. Furthermore, in order to provide more discriminative feature representation, the authors extract the intermediate features of the region proposal network and input them into effective mixed attention network. Finally, the cascade head is used to refine the predicted bounding box to achieve high‐quality defect location. To demonstrate the superiority and usefulness of this method, it is compared to the latest method using widely used PCB and NEU data sets. A large number of trials demonstrate that this strategy outperforms other methods for detecting defects in complicated backgrounds. Defect detection in a complex background is a critical issue. To address this issue, this paper proposes the mixture attention mechanism cascade network (MACN), in which the new channel attention network is linked with the spatial attention network to create an effective mixed attention network (EMAN) that takes advantage of their respective advantages, adaptively suppresses background noise, and highlights defect features.