In this study, a tyre defect detection model is improved and optimized under the YOLOv5 framework, aiming at radial tyre defects with characteristics such as an elongated shape and various target sizes and defect types. The DySneakConv module is introduced to replace the first BotteneckCSP in the Backbone network. The deformation offset of the DySneakConv module is used to make the convolutional energy freely adapt to the structure to improve the recognition rate of tyre defects with elongated features; the AIFI module is introduced to replace the fourth BotteneckCSP, and the self-attention mechanism and the processing of large-scale features are used to improve the recognition rate of tyre defects with elongated features using the AIFI module. This latter module has a self-attention mechanism and the ability to handle large-scale features to solve the problems of diverse tyre defects and different sizes. Secondly, the CARAFE up-sampling operator is introduced to replace the up-sampling operator in the Neck network. The up-sampling kernel prediction module in the CARAFE operator is used to increase the receptive field and allow the feature reorganization module to capture more semantic information to overcome the information loss problem of the up-sampling operator. Finally, based on the improved YOLOv5 detection algorithm, the Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation algorithm lightens the model, reducing its computational requirements and size while ensuring detection accuracy. Experimental studies were conducted on a dataset containing four types of tyre defects. Experimental results for the training set show that the improved algorithm improves the mAP0.5 by 4.6 pp, reduces the model size by 25.6 MB, reduces the computational complexity of the model by 31.3 GFLOPs, and reduces the number of parameters by 12.7 × 106 compared to the original YOLOv5m algorithm. Experimental results for the test set show that the improved algorithm improves the mAP0.5 by 2.6 pp compared to the original YOLOv5m algorithm. This suggests that the improved algorithm is more suitable for tyre defect detection than the original YOLOv5.
