Efficient YOLO-based models for real-time ceramic crack detection

Abstract

The following research work systematically compares four variants of you only look once (YOLO), namely, YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and YOLOv11 proposed recently, considering the key properties required to perform ceramic surface crack detection tasks with high computational efficiency, real-time inference speed, and low memory usage. A total of 300 images of ceramic surfaces were collected with manually labeled cracks and divided into training, validation, and testing sets in portions of 263, 22, and 15 images, respectively. Each of the four YOLO variants was trained for 50 and 100 epochs, and each was evaluated regarding mean average precision (mAP), inference time, model size, and computational complexity in giga floating point operations per second (GFLOPs). YOLOv9 produced the highest accuracy with mAP values as high as 0.752-0.79 but the highest cost in terms of increased computational complexity. However, among these methods, YOLOv8 can produce the fastest inference (~2-2.3 ms) with a small memory footprint (~6 MB) with an acceptable accuracy of ~0.65-0.67. The results showed that YOLOv8 is the most feasible to deploy in resource constrained industrial automation environments. By offering this comparative study, the research attempts to provide hints for the selection of appropriate YOLO-based models by practitioners in quality control applications related to ceramic manufacturing.