YOLO-MSD: a robust industrial surface defect detection model via multi-scale feature fusion

Abstract

Abstract Object detection is vital for automated surface defect inspection, yet most models suffer from bloated architectures and poor performance on multi‑class, multi‑scale tasks involving large‑size images, limiting their use on edge devices. We propose YOLO‑MSD, a lightweight surface defect detection model that integrates two key designs: (1) a novel four-scale backbone that effectively extracts small and multi-scale targets from large-size images by enhancing feature representation across different scale resolutions, and (2) a streamlined feature‑pyramid neck that boosts cross‑scale fusion while reducing parameters and computational cost. Extensive experiments on five public datasets verify the model’s effectiveness. On the PCB, HRIPCB and GC10‑DET datasets featuring high-resolution images, YOLO‑MSD achieves 96.67% mAP , 96.62% mAP and 69.09% mAP , respectively, while maintaining a low parameter count and computational complexity. It also outperforms most advanced models on two additional public datasets and achieves 20.82 FPS with a power consumption of 6.95 W on the PCB dataset when deployed on a Jetson Xavier NX edge device. These results demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and deployability of YOLO‑MSD for industrial surface‑defect detection.