SLGA-YOLO: A Lightweight Castings Surface Defect Detection Method Based on Fusion-Enhanced Attention Mechanism and Self-Architecture

Castings' surface-defect detection is a crucial machine vision-based automation technology. This paper proposes a fusion-enhanced attention mechanism and efficient self-architecture lightweight YOLO (SLGA-YOLO) to overcome the existing target detection algorithms' poor computational efficiency and low defect-detection accuracy. We used the SlimNeck module to improve the neck module and reduce redundant information interference. The integration of simplified attention module (SimAM) and Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) fusion strengthens the attention mechanism, improving the detection performance, while significantly reducing computational complexity and memory usage. To enhance the generalization ability of the model's feature extraction, we replaced part of the basic convolutional blocks with the self-designed GhostConvML (GCML) module, based on the addition of p2 detection. We also constructed the Alpha- loss function to accelerate model convergence. The experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced algorithm increases the average detection accuracy (mAP@0.5) by 3% and the average detection accuracy (mAP@0.5:0.95) by 1.6% in the castings' surface defects dataset.