Surface Crack Detection Method for Coal Rock Based on Improved YOLOv5

Coal mine safety may be able to be ensured via the real-time identification of cracks in rock and coal surfaces. Traditional crack identification methods have the disadvantages of slow speed and low precision. This work suggests an improved You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) detection model. In this study, we improved YOLOv5 from the perspective of three aspects: a Ghost module was introduced into the backbone network to lighten the model; a coordinate attention mechanism was added; and ECIOU_Loss is proposed as a loss function in this paper to achieve the co-optimization of crack detection speed and accuracy and to meet the deployment requirements in the embedded terminal. The results demonstrate that the improved YOLOv5 has a 92.8% mean average precision (mAP) with an 8 MB model size, and the speed of recognition was 103 frames per second. Compared to the original method, there was a 53.4% reduction in the number of parameters, a detection speed that was 1.9 times faster, and a 1.7% improvement in the mAP. The improved YOLOv5 can effectively locate cracks in real time and offers a new technique for the early warning of coal and rock dynamic hazards.