The damage of wind turbine blades is one of the main problems restricting wind power development. Object detection can identify the damaged regions and diagnose the damage types. To handle the high-resolution wind turbine blade images, this article presents a novel efficient, and accurate damage detector (EADD) for wind turbine blade images. The proposed method adopts Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) as the detection framework and offers an improved ResNet as the backbone. Firstly, the improved ResNet backbone uses dense connection blocks consisting of factorized depth-wise separable bottleneck (FDSB) and feature aggregation module (FAM), which makes the damage detection model more lightweight and has a faster detection speed. Secondly, the bidirectional cross-scale feature pyramid (BiFPN) is introduced into the proposed method to use multi-scale features fully and have more feature expression. In addition, data pre-processing, exponential moving average (EMA) and label smooth methods are utilized to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model. The experimental results on the wind turbine blade damage detection dataset show that our proposed method can achieve the best trade-off between detection accuracy and computation time compared with other competitive methods.INDEX TERMS Wind turbine blade; damage detection; SSD; dense connection; BiFPN.

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