Surface Defect Detection for Automated Tape Laying and Winding Based on Improved YOLOv5

To address the issues of low detection accuracy, slow detection speed, high missed detection rate, and high false detection rate in the detection of surface defects on pre-impregnated composite materials during the automated tape laying and winding process, an improved YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) algorithm model was proposed to achieve the high-precision, real-time detection of surface defects. By leveraging this improvement, the necessity for frequent manual interventions, inspection interventions, and subsequent rework during the automated lay-up process of composite materials can be significantly reduced. Firstly, to improve the detection accuracy, an attention mechanism called “CA (coordinate attention)” was introduced to enhance the feature extraction ability, and a Separate CA structure was used to improve the detection speed. Secondly, we used an improved loss function “SIoU (SCYLLA-Intersection over Union) loss” to replace the original “CIoU (Complete-Intersection over Union) loss”, which introduced an angle loss as a penalty term to consider the directional factor and improve the stability of the target box regression. Finally, Soft-SIoU-NMS was used to replace the original NMS (non-maximum suppression) of YOLOv5 to improve the detection of overlapping defects. The results showed that the improved model had a good detection performance for surface defects on pre-impregnated composite materials during the automated tape laying and winding process. The FPS (frames per second) increased from 66.7 to 72.1, and the mAP (mean average precision) of the test set increased from 92.6% to 97.2%. These improvements ensured that the detection accuracy, as measured by the mAP, surpassed 95%, while maintaining a detection speed of over 70 FPS, thereby meeting the requirements for real-time online detection.