DCFE-YOLO: A novel fabric defect detection method

Accurate detection of fabric defects is crucial for quality control in the textile industry. However, the task of fabric defect detection remains highly challenging due to the complex textures and diverse defect patterns. To address the issues of inaccurate localization and false positives caused by complex textures and varying defect sizes, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv8-based fabric defect detection method. First, Dynamic Snake Convolution is introduced into the backbone network to enhance sensitivity to elongated and subtle defects, improving the extraction of edge and texture details. Second, a Channel Priority Convolutional Attention mechanism is incorporated after the Spatial Pyramid Pooling layer to enable more precise defect localization by leveraging multi-scale structures and channel priors. Finally, the feature fusion network integrates Partial Convolution and Efficient Multi-scale Attention, optimizing the fusion of information across different feature levels and spatial scales, which enhances the richness and accuracy of feature representations while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in detection performance. Specifically, mAP@0.5 increased by 2.9%, precision improved by 3.5%, and mAP@0.5:0.95 rose by 2.3%, highlighting the model’s superior capability in detecting complex defects. The project is available at https://github.com/lilian998/fabric.