Optimization of steel plate quality inspection driven by PscSE and SPPFELAN

Based on the improved YOLOv8n, a steel plate defect detection and recognition method is proposed to address the high labor costs and workload of traditional tasks. SPPFELAN processes inputs in parallel to enhance computational efficiency by executing multiple pooling operations simultaneously. The parallel feature fusion module PscSE, using a mixed‐dimension SE attention mechanism (scSE), captures global and channel‐related information better, improving characterization capability. The EIOU loss function addresses the ambiguous aspect ratio definition of CIOU loss, enhancing detection accuracy and accelerating convergence. Results show the YOLOv8n‐PscSE‐SPPFELAN model achieves 76.9% mAP@0.5 on the Northeastern University steel plate dataset, a 4.6% improvement over the original YOLOv8n, with a computation amount of 7.7 GFLOPs, reducing resource usage and greatly improving detection speed.