REDef-DETR: real-time and efficient DETR for industrial surface defect detection

Abstract Industrial surface defect detection is an important part of industrial production, which aims to identify and detecting various defects on the surface of product to ensure quality and meet customer requirements. With the development of deep learning and image processing technologies, the surface defect detection methods based on computer vision has become the mainstream method. However, the prevalent convolutional neural network-based defect detection methods also have many problems. For example, these methods rely on post-processing of Non-Maximum Suppression and have poor detection ability for small targets, which affects the speed and accuracy of surface defect detection in industrial scenarios. Therefore, we propose a novel DEtection TRansformer-based surface defect detection method. Firstly, we propose a Multi-scale Contextual Information Dilated module and fuse it into the backbone. The module is mainly composed of large kernel convolutions, which aims to expand the receptive field of the model, thus reducing the leakage rate of the model. Moreover, we design an efficient encoder which mainly contains two important modules, namely feature enhancement based on cascaded group attention module and efficient feature fusion module based on content-aware. The former module effectively enhances the high-level semantic information extracted by the backbone, thus enabling the model to better interpret features, and it can improve the problem of high computational cost of transformer encoder, thus increasing the detection speed. The latter module performs multi-scale feature fusion across the feature information of various scales, thus improving the detection accuracy of the model for small-size defects. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 80.6%mAP and 80.3FPS on NEU-DET, and 98.0%mAP and 79.4FPS on PCB-DET. Our proposed method exhibits excellent detection performance and achieves real-time and efficient surface defect detection capability to meet the needs of industrial surface defect detection.