FC-YOLO: an aircraft skin defect detection algorithm based on multi-scale collaborative feature fusion

Abstract Aircraft skin defects pose a threat to the safety and airworthiness of the aircraft. The front line of engineering has requirements of high precision and stable defect detection, which cannot be met by existing deep learning methods, due to conflicting information between multi-scale features. Herein, a Fine-Coordinated YOLO (FC-YOLO) algorithm is proposed to detect aircraft skin defects. Firstly, the ELAN-C module with Coordinate & Channel Attention mechanism is applied to the backbone network to enhance multi-scale detection precision. Secondly, the Adaptive-Path Aggregation Network structure is proposed to make features containing more information by adding a shortcut weighted by the Adaptively Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) module. The ASFF adaptively allocates the weights of features with different sizes to reduce the inconsistency of features between different levels during feature fusion to improve detection precision. Finally, the SCYLLA-IoU loss function is introduced to calculate the directional loss between the bounding box and the ground truth box to elevate the stability of the training. Experiments are executed with a self-constructed ASD-DET dataset and the public NEU-DET dataset. Results show that the mAP of FC-YOLO is improved by 3.1% and 2.7% compared to that of the original YOLOv7 on the ASD-DET dataset and the NEU-DET dataset. In addition, on the ASD-DET dataset and NEU-DET dataset, the mAP of FC-YOLO was higher than that of YOLOv8, RT-DETR by 1.4%, 1.6% and 2.2%, 3.8%, respectively. By which, it is shown that the proposed FC-YOLO algorithm is promising for the future automatic visual inspection of aircraft skin.