# Defect Transformer: An Efficient Hybrid Transformer Architecture for Surface Defect Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Conditional Positional Encodings for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10882/) (2021)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06263/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [VT-ADL: A Vision Transformer Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10036/) (2021)
- [ViTAE: Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring Intrinsic Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03348/) (2021)
- [Large Kernel Matters -- Improve Semantic Segmentation by Global Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02719/) (2017)
- [How Much Position Information Do Convolutional Neural Networks Encode?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08248/) (2020)
- [UTNet: A Hybrid Transformer Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00781/) (2021)
- [P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12011/) (2021)
- [ResT: An Efficient Transformer for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13677/) (2021)

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

- [A Review of Transformer-Based Models for Computer Vision Tasks: Capturing Global Context and Spatial Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15178/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Machine Learning Driven Material Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07880/) (2024)
- [Multi-feature Reconstruction Network using Crossed-mask Restoration for Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13273/) (2024)
- [Global Context Aggregation Network for Lightweight Saliency Detection of Surface Defects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12641/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Feature-Driven Deep Learning for the Prediction of Duck Body Dimensions and Weight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14001/) (2025)
- [UniSpector: Towards Universal Open-set Defect Recognition via Spectral-Contrastive Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02905/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Surface defect detection is an extremely crucial step to ensure the quality of industrial products. Nowadays, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based on encoder-decoder architecture have achieved tremendous success in various defect detection tasks. However, due to the intrinsic locality of convolution, they commonly exhibit a limitation in explicitly modeling long-range interactions, critical for pixel-wise defect detection in complex cases, e.g., cluttered background and illegible pseudo-defects. Recent transformers are especially skilled at learning global image dependencies but with limited local structural information necessary for detailed defect location. To overcome the above limitations, we propose an efficient hybrid transformer architecture, termed Defect Transformer (DefT), for surface defect detection, which incorporates CNN and transformer into a unified model to capture local and non-local relationships collaboratively. Specifically, in the encoder module, a convolutional stem block is firstly adopted to retain more detailed spatial information. Then, the patch aggregation blocks are used to generate multi-scale representation with four hierarchies, each of them is followed by a series of DefT blocks, which respectively include a locally position-aware block for local position encoding, a lightweight multi-pooling self-attention to model multi-scale global contextual relationships with good computational efficiency, and a convolutional feed-forward network for feature transformation and further location information learning. Finally, a simple but effective decoder module is proposed to gradually recover spatial details from the skip connections in the encoder. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our method compared with other CNN- and transformer-based networks.