English

A Deformable Attention-Based Detection Transformer with Cross-Scale Feature Fusion for Industrial Coil Spring Inspection

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-17 v1

Abstract

Automated visual inspection of locomotive coil springs presents significant challenges due to the morphological diversity of surface defects, substantial scale variations, and complex industrial backgrounds. This paper proposes MSD-DETR (Multi-Scale Deformable Detection Transformer), a novel detection framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: (1) a structural re-parameterization strategy that decouples training-time multi-branch topology from inference-time efficiency, enhancing feature extraction while maintaining real-time performance; (2) a deformable attention mechanism that enables content-adaptive spatial sampling, allowing dynamic focus on defect-relevant regions regardless of morphological irregularity; and (3) a cross-scale feature fusion architecture incorporating GSConv modules and VoVGSCSP blocks for effective multi-resolution information aggregation. Comprehensive experiments on a real-world locomotive coil spring dataset demonstrate that MSD-DETR achieves 92.4\% [email protected] at 98 FPS, outperforming state-of-the-art detectors including YOLOv8 (+3.1\% mAP) and the baseline RT-DETR (+2.8\% mAP) while maintaining comparable inference speed, establishing a new benchmark for industrial coil spring quality inspection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13429,
  title  = {A Deformable Attention-Based Detection Transformer with Cross-Scale Feature Fusion for Industrial Coil Spring Inspection},
  author = {Matteo Rossi and Pony Matt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13429},
  year   = {2026}
}