Model Iteration Method for Surface Defect Detection of Continuous Casting Slabs Based on Response Selection Strategy

doi:10.3901/JME.260492

Abstract

Abstract: In the production of continuous casting slabs, the scarcity of surface defect sample data necessitates frequent iterative updates of detection models. Traditional iterative training methods are time-consuming, computationally expensive, and easily lead to the loss of previously learned critical features. To address these issues, a model iteration method based on a response selection strategy is proposed to train the YOLOv8 detector via incremental learning. Based on the knowledge distillation framework, a response selection strategy utilizing statistical principles is designed to filter out ineffective knowledge, enabling the student model to inherit effective features from the teacher model more accurately and enhancing the distillation effect. The proposed method is validated through experiments on the MS COCO 2017 dataset and a collected surface defect dataset of continuous casting slabs. Experimental results indicate that under the condition of fine-tuning only with new samples, the degree of forgetting is significantly alleviated, reducing the drop in average precision(AP) by 12.9 on the casting defect dataset. Compared to traditional time-consuming iterative methods involving retraining on full data, the proposed strategy exhibits a gap of only 3.3 AP while drastically reducing computational resource consumption and time costs. It is concluded that this iterative strategy achieves rapid and low-cost iteration of the surface defect detection model for continuous casting slabs while maintaining acceptable detection accuracy, demonstrating significant engineering application value.

Key words: defect detection, incremental learning, knowledge distillation, continuous casting slabs, modal iteration

CLC Number:

TG142

CAO Xiangyu, XU Ke, ZHANG Hanxin, HUANG Lei, HUANG Xuezhong, WEI Yi. Model Iteration Method for Surface Defect Detection of Continuous Casting Slabs Based on Response Selection Strategy[J]. Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2026, 62(10): 73-82.

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URL: http://www.cjmenet.com.cn/EN/10.3901/JME.260492

http://www.cjmenet.com.cn/EN/Y2026/V62/I10/73

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