Defect Detection for Metal Shaft Surfaces Based on an Improved YOLOv5 Algorithm and Transfer Learning

To address the problem of low efficiency for manual detection in the defect detection field for metal shafts, we propose a deep learning defect detection method based on the improved YOLOv5 algorithm. First, we add a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) mechanism layer to the last layer of the backbone network to improve the feature extraction capability. Second, the neck network introduces the Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) module to replace the original Path-Aggregation Network (PAN) structure and enhance the multi-scale feature fusion. Finally, we use transfer learning to pre-train the model and improve the generalization ability of the model. The experimental results show that the method achieves an average accuracy of 93.6% mAP and a detection speed of 16.7 FPS for defect detection on the dataset, which can identify metal shaft surface defects quickly and accurately, and is of reference significance for practical industrial applications.