In recent years, the foreign fibers in cotton lint significantly affect the quality of the final cotton textile products. It remains a challenging task to accurately distinguish foreign fibers from cotton. This article proposes an embedded system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) + digital signal processor (DSP) to recognize and remove foreign fibers mixed in cotton. With substantial tests of this system, we collect massive samples of foreign fibers and fake foreign fibers. Based on these samples, a convolution neural network mode is developed to validate the classification of the suspected targets from the detection subsystem, to improve the detection reliability. After training several model architectures, we find a model with the best balance between performance and computation. The high success rate (up to 96% in the validation set) demonstrates the effectiveness of the model. Moreover, the computation time (5 ms on a single image based on an eight-core DSP) indicates the efficiency of the detection, which ensures the real-time application of the system.

Addressing the low accuracy and slow detection speed experienced by algorithms based on deep learning for a leather defect detection task, a lightweight and improved leather defect detection algorithm, dubbed YOLOv8-AGE, has been proposed based on YOLOv8n. In the backbone network, the EMA attention mechanism and C2f module have been fused into the C2f-EMA module, achieving performance enhancement with lower computational overhead. In the neck, the AFPN structure has been combined with the VoV-GSCSP module constructed using GSConv, to reduce the number of parameters while enhancing the model’s multi-scale detection capability. Finally, a shared convolutional layer has been introduced for simplifying the design of the detection head. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved algorithm achieves an improvement of 1.39% in mAP50 and reduces the number of parameters and GFLOPs by 9.3% and 7.41%, respectively, as compared to the original YOLOv8 model. On the dataset in this paper, there is an improvement in accuracy and detection speed over mainstream algorithms.

Foreign fibers directly impact the quality of raw cotton, affecting the prices of textile products and the economic efficiency of cotton textile enterprises. The accurate differentiation and labeling of foreign fibers require domain-specific knowledge, and labeling scattered cotton foreign fibers in images consumes substantial time and labor costs. In this study, we propose a semi-supervised foreign fiber detection approach that uses unlabeled image information and a small amount of labeled data for model training. Our proposed method, Efficient YOLOv5-cotton, introduces CBAM to address the issue of the missed detection and false detection of small-sized cotton foreign fibers against complex backgrounds. Second, the algorithm designs a multiscale feature information extraction network, SPPFCSPC, which improves its ability to generalize to fibers of different shapes. Lastly, to reduce the increased network parameters and computational complexity introduced by the SPPFCSPC module, we replace the C3 layer with the C3Ghost module. We evaluate Efficient YOLOv5 for detecting various types of foreign fibers. The results demonstrate that the improved Efficient YOLOv5-cotton achieves a 1.6% increase in mAP@0.5 (mean average precision) compared with the original Efficient YOLOv5 and reduces model parameters by 10% compared to the original Efficient YOLOv5 with SPPFCSPC. Our experiments show that our proposed method enhances the accuracy of foreign fiber detection using Efficient YOLOv5-cotton and considers the trade-off between the model size and computational cost.

Machine harvesting of cotton in Xinjiang has significantly improved harvesting efficiency; however, it has also resulted in a considerable increase in residual mulch content within the cotton, which has severely affected the quality and market value of cotton textiles. Existing mulch detection algorithms based on machine vision generally suffer from complex parameterization and insufficient real-time performance. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a novel mulch detection algorithm, Mulch-YOLO, developed on the YOLOv11 framework. Specifically, an improved CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) is incorporated into the BiFPN (Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network) to achieve more effective fusion of multi-scale mulch features. To enhance the semantic representation of mulch features, a modified Content-Aware ReAssembly of Features module, CARAFE-Mulch (Content-Aware ReAssembly of Features), is designed to reorganize feature maps, resulting in stronger feature expressiveness compared with the original representations. Furthermore, the MobileOne module is optimized by integrating the DECA Dilated Efficient Channel Attention (Dilated Efficient Channel Attention) module, thereby reducing both the parameter count and computational load while improving detection efficiency in real time. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments were conducted on a real-world dataset containing 20,134 images of low-visual-saliency plastic mulch. The results indicate that Mulch-YOLO achieves a lightweight architecture and high detection accuracy. Compared with YOLOv11n, the proposed method improves mAP@0.5 by 4.7% and mAP@0.5:0.95 by 3.3%, with a 24% reduction in model parameters.

Industrial surface defect detection faces challenges of complex textures, diverse defect morphologies, and scarce labeled data, especially for non-woven fabrics. This paper proposes a dual-domain reverse distillation algorithm for unsupervised defect detection (DDRD). The algorithm integrates frequency-domain wavelet enhancement and spatial-domain self-attention to enhance defect features synergistically. A Wavelet High-frequency Deformable Enhancement Module amplifies fine-grained defect details, while a Convolutional Self-Attention Spatial Global Enhancement Module captures long-range spatial dependencies. The enhanced dual-domain features are embedded into a reverse distillation framework for end-to-end training, achieving precise defect localization via feature reconstruction errors. Extensive experiments are conducted on the self-built large-scale non-woven fabric WFB dataset and the public MVTec AD benchmark dataset. The results show that DDRD achieves 98.0% pixel-level AUROC and 93.0% image-level AUROC on the WFB dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art RD4AD method by 0.5% and 1.5%, respectively. On the MVTec AD dataset, it attains an average of 97.5% pixel-level AUROC and 99.7% image-level AUROC, with perfect 100% image-level detection accuracy on multiple categories. These results validate the efficacy and robustness of the dual-domain enhancement strategy for industrial defect detection tasks.