PurposeIn the process of continuous casting and rolling of steel plate, due to the influence of rolling equipment and process, there are scratches, inclusions, patches, scabs and pitted surfaces on the surface of steel plate, which will not only affect the corrosion resistance, wear resistance and fatigue strength of steel plate but also may cause production accidents. Therefore, the detection of steel plate surface defect must be strengthened to ensure the production quality of steel plate and the smooth development of industrial construction.Design/methodology/approach(1) A steel plate surface defect detection technology based on small datasets is proposed, which can detect multiple surface defects and fill in the blank of scab defect detection. (2) A detection system based on intelligent recognition technology is built. The steel plate images are collected by the front-end monitoring device, then transmitted to the back-end monitoring center and processed by the embedded intelligent algorithms. (3) In order to reduce the impact of external light on the image, an improved Multi-Scale Retinex (MSR) enhancement algorithm based on adaptive weight calculation is proposed, which lays the foundation for subsequent object segmentation and feature extraction. (4) According to the different factors such as the cause and shape, the texture and shape features are combined to classify different defects on the steel plate surface. The defect classification model is constructed and the classification results are recorded and stored, which has certain application value in the field of steel plate surface defect detection. (5) The practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by comparison with other methods, and the field running tests are conducted based on the equipment commissioning field of China Heavy Machinery Institute.FindingsWhen applied to small dataset, the precision of the proposed method is 94.5% and the time is 23.7 ms. In order to compare with deep learning technology, after expanding the image dataset, the precision and detection time of this paper are 0.948 and 24.2 ms, respectively. The proposed method is superior to other traditional image processing and deep learning methods. And the field recognition precision is 91.7%.Originality/valueIn brief, the steel plate surface defect detection technology based on computer vision is effective, but the previous attempts and methods are not comprehensive and the accuracy and detection speed need to be improved. Therefore, a more practical and comprehensive technology is developed in this paper. The main contributions are as follows: (1) A steel plate surface defect detection technology based on small datasets is proposed, which can detect multiple surface defects and fill in the blank of scab defect detection. (2) A detection system based on intelligent recognition technology is built. The steel plate images are collected by the front-end monitoring device, then transmitted to the back-end monitoring center and processed by the embedded intelligent algorithms. (3) In order to reduce the impact of external light on the image, an improved MSR enhancement algorithm based on adaptive weight calculation is proposed, which lays the foundation for subsequent object segmentation and feature extraction. (4) According to the different factors such as the cause and shape, the texture and shape features are combined to classify different defects on the steel plate surface. The defect classification model is constructed and the classification results are recorded and stored, which has certain application value in the field of steel plate surface defect detection. (5) The practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by comparison with other methods, and the field running tests are conducted based on the equipment commissioning field of China Heavy Machinery Institute.
