SPDCN: Strip-based Deformable Convolutional Network for Steel Surface Defect Segmentation

Steel surface defect segmentation is critical for industrial quality inspection, yet existing methods struggle with elongated, anisotropic defects such as cracks and scratches due to the isotropic receptive fields of standard convolutions and rigid sampling grids that cannot adapt to irregular defect boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose Strip-based Predictor for Deformable Convolutional Networks (SPDCN) with two key innovations. The Fuzzy-enhanced Multi-scale Context Module (FMCM) employs group-wise multi-branch convolutions with an intuitionistic fuzzy channel attention mechanism to adaptively capture multi-scale contextual information across varying defect sizes. The Adaptive Direction-Aware Deformable Convolution (ADADC) replaces the conventional offset predictor with decoupled horizontal and vertical strip convolutions, enabling the deformable sampling grid to anisotropically align with the principal orientation of elongated defects. Extensive experiments on public steel surface defect benchmarks demonstrate that SPDCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 89.60% mIoU on NEU-Seg with only 3.54M parameters. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/DWlzm .