PCB-YOLO: Enhancing PCB surface defect detection with coordinate attention and multi-scale feature fusion

Nowadays, industrial electronic products are integrated into all aspects of life, with PCB quality playing a decisive role in their performance. Ensuring PCB factory quality is thus crucial. Common PCB defects serve as key references for evaluating quality. To address low detection accuracy and the bulky size of existing models, we propose an improved PCB-YOLO model based on YOLOv8n.To reduce model size, we introduce a novel CRSCC module combining SCConv convolution and C2f, enhancing PCB defect detection accuracy and significantly reducing model parameters. For feature fusion, we propose the FFCA attention module, designed to handle PCB surface defect characteristics by fusing multi-scale local features. This improves spatial dependency capture, detail attention, feature resolution, and detection accuracy. Additionally, the WIPIoU loss function is developed to calculate IoU using auxiliary boundaries and address low-quality data, improving small-target recognition and accelerating convergence. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in PCB defect detection, with mAP50 increasing by 5.7%, and reductions of 13.3% and 14.8% in model parameters and computational complexity, respectively. Compared to mainstream models, PCB-YOLO achieves the best overall performance. The model’s effectiveness and generalization are further validated on the NEU-DET steel surface defect dataset, achieving excellent results. The PCB-YOLO model offers a practical, efficient solution for PCB and steel defect detection, with broad application prospects.