# LF-YOLO: A Lighter and Faster YOLO for Weld Defect Detection of X-ray Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15045/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [Receptive Field Block Net for Accurate and Fast Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07767/) (2017)
- [Dynamic R-CNN: Towards High Quality Object Detection via Dynamic Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06002/) (2020)
- [M2Det: A Single-Shot Object Detector based on Multi-Level Feature Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04533/) (2018)
- [SINet: A Scale-insensitive Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00433/) (2018)
- [A Unified Light Framework for Real-time Fault Detection of Freight Train Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00381/) (2021)
- [MatrixNets: A New Scale and Aspect Ratio Aware Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03194/) (2020)
- [A Lightweight and Accurate Recognition Framework for Signs of X-ray Weld Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09278/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Spatial-information Guided Adaptive Context-aware Network for Efficient RGB-D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06024/) (2023)
- [A Decade of You Only Look Once (YOLO) for Object Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18586/) (2025)
- [Unification of Closed-Open Industrial Detection Scenarios: New Large-Scale Benchmarks,Challenges and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07953/) (2026)
- [Capacity Constraint Analysis Using Object Detection for Smart Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00243/) (2024)
- [Better YOLO with Attention-Augmented Network and Enhanced Generalization Performance for Safety Helmet Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02591/) (2024)
- [J-DDL: Surface Damage Detection and Localization System for Fighter Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10505/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

X-ray image plays an important role in manufacturing industry for quality assurance, because it can reflect the internal condition of weld region. However, the shape and scale of different defect types vary greatly, which makes it challenging for model to detect weld defects. In this paper, we propose a weld defect detection method based on convolution neural network, namely Lighter and Faster YOLO (LF-YOLO). In particularly, a reinforced multiscale feature (RMF) module is designed to implement both parameter-based and parameter-free multi-scale information extracting operation. RMF enables the extracted feature map capable to represent more plentiful information, which is achieved by superior hierarchical fusion structure. To improve the performance of detection network, we propose an efficient feature extraction (EFE) module. EFE processes input data with extremely low consumption, and improves the practicability of whole network in actual industry. Experimental results show that our weld defect detection network achieves satisfactory balance between performance and consumption, and reaches 92.9 mean average precision mAP50 with 61.5 frames per second (FPS). To further prove the ability of our method, we test it on public dataset MS COCO, and the results show that our LF-YOLO has a outstanding versatility detection performance. The code is available at https://github.com/lmomoy/LF-YOLO.