Small target disease detection based on YOLOv5 framework for intelligent bridges

This paper proposes a small target disease detection method using YOLOv5 framework for detecting small apparent diseases on intelligent bridges, aiming to address the problem of missed and false detection. To enhance the detection of small apparent diseases, a layer for detecting small objects is added to the YOLOv5 model. Additionally, an ECA attention mechanism module is embedded in the feature enhancement network to improve the extraction of disease features. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a dataset of 996 bridges with apparent diseases such as corrosion, rebar, speckle, hole and spall was established and trained after manual annotation and data augmentation. The experiment showed that the proposed algorithm achieves a mAP of 87.91%. Compared to the original YOLOv5 model, the proposed algorithm improved the mAP on the bridge apparent disease dataset by 1.97%. This algorithm accurately detects small apparent diseases on bridges and effectively reduces missed detection.