# BladeYOLO: Wind Turbine Blade Defect Detection with Limited Annotations and Weak-Saliency Awareness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28065 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28065/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Point clouds, detection and remote sensing, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 34 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Point clouds, detection and remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/point-clouds-detection-and-remote-sensing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17140/) (2024)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter: Bringing Salient Object Detection to the Foreground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06091/) (2018)
- [RRNet: Relational Reasoning Network with Parallel Multi-scale Attention for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14223/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Object Detection Meets DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20787/) (2025)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [SegDINO: An Efficient Design for Medical and Natural Image Segmentation with DINO-V3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00833/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wind turbine blade defect detection remains highly challenging in real-world inspection scenarios due to limited on-site data and the subtle visual characteristics of defects. In practice, blade defects are often small-scale, low-contrast, and difficult to distinguish from complex backgrounds, which significantly limits the robustness of existing detectors. To address these challenges, we propose BladeYOLO, a defect detection framework for wind turbine blades. Specifically, we integrate a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone initialized with DINOv3 self-supervised pre-trained weights into YOLOv12-L, enabling the transfer of large-scale generic visual priors to blade defect detection and improving feature representation under limited training annotations. To enhance the perception of subtle defects, we further develop a Mamba-guided Weak-Defect Enhancement module, which consists of a Detail-Enhanced Multi-scale Branch for preserving high-frequency structural cues and a Cross-Mamba module for progressively propagating high-level semantic guidance to shallow features. In addition, we introduce a lightweight Style-Injector module that captures environment-related style information via Fourier decomposition and injects it into selected ViT self-attention layers, thereby improving robustness against environment-induced appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BladeYOLO achieves superior performance on the WTBlade-Defect dataset, with additional annotation-budget experiments showing its favorable performance under reduced training annotations. Evaluation on the public Wind Surface Defect dataset further provides supportive evidence for the cross-dataset robustness of BladeYOLO. In particular, on this public dataset, BladeYOLO outperforms the best competing method by 3.5% in mAP50 and 2.5% in mAP50-95.