Wind Turbine Blade Damage Detection Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv11
(1.Vocational and Technical College of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Baotou 014109, China; 2.Nanjing Saturn Vision Technology Co., Ltd., Nanjing 210019, China; 3.School of Mechanical Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, Hohhot 010051, China)
Abstract
To address the problems of low detection efficiency, poor recognition accuracy for small targets, and poor adaptability to engineering deployment in traditional wind turbine blade damage detection under complex environments, an intelligent detection scheme based on Deep Learning is proposed. First, a multi-scene dataset of wind turbine blades is collected, augmented, and annotated to construct a comprehensive dataset. Second, through a systematic and comprehensive comparison of five object detection algorithms—YOLOv7, YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and YOLOv11—YOLOv11 is selected as the optimal detection model and fused with five mainstream attention mechanisms, including CBAM, ASPP, SKNet, ShuffleAttention, and UFO-ViT, to perform damage detection on the blades. Experimental results confirm that the YOLOv11+SKNet detection scheme significantly improves both the accuracy and efficiency of wind turbine blade damage detection in complex environments. Its mAP reaches 89.6%, a 0.6% improvement over YOLOv11, which effectively enhances the multi-scale feature extraction capability of the model and optimizes target localization accuracy. This method can provide reliable technical support and a theoretical basis for the intelligent operation and maintenance of wind power equipment.
Keywords
wind turbine blade; damage detection; YOLOv11; attention mechanism; SKNet
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Funding
First Class Discipline Research Special Project (YLXKZX-NGD-020); Basic Research Funds for Autonomous Region Directly Affiliated Universities (JY20250076)
About the authors
Lv Caixia (1990-), female, Han ethnicity, from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, lecturer, master's degree, research direction: intelligent equipment manufacturing and algorithm design.