Research on Defect Detection in Automated Fiber Placement Processes Based on a Multi-Scale Detector

Various surface defects in automated fiber placement (AFP) processes affect the forming quality of the components. In addition, defect detection usually requires manual observation with the naked eye, which leads to low production efficiency. Therefore, automatic solutions for defect recognition have high economic potential. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale AFP defect detection algorithm, named the spatial pyramid feature fusion YOLOv5 with channel attention (SPFFY-CA). The spatial pyramid feature fusion YOLOv5 (SPFFY) adopts spatial pyramid dilated convolutions (SPDCs) to fuse the feature maps extracted in different receptive fields, thus integrating multi-scale defect information. For the feature maps obtained from a concatenate function, channel attention (CA) can improve the representation ability of the network and generate more effective features. In addition, the sparsity training and pruning (STP) method is utilized to achieve network slimming, thus ensuring the efficiency and accuracy of defect detection. The experimental results of the PASCAL VOC and our AFP defect datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme, which achieves superior performance