FastBeltNet: a dual-branch light-weight network for real-time conveyor belt edge detection

Belt conveyors are widely used in multiple industries, including coal, steel, port, power, metallurgy, and chemical, etc. One major challenge faced by these industries is belt deviation, which can negatively impact production efficiency and safety. Despite previous research on improving belt edge detection accuracy, there is still a need to prioritize system efficiency and light-weight models for practical industrial applications. To meet this need, a new semantic segmentation network called FastBeltNet has been developed specifically for real-time and highly accurate conveyor belt edge line segmentation while maintaining a light-weight design. This network uses a dual-branch structure that combines a shallow spatial branch for extracting high-resolution spatial information with a context branch for deep contextual semantic information. It also incorporates the Ghost blocks, Downsample blocks, and Input Injection blocks to reduce computational load, increase processing frame rate, and enhance feature representation. Experimental results have shown that FastBeltNet has performed comparatively better than some existing methods in different real-world production settings, achieving promising performance metrics. Specifically, FastBeltNet achieves 80.49% mIoU accuracy, 99.89 FPS processing speed, 895 k parameters, 8.23 GFLOPs, and 430.95 MB peak CUDA memory use, effectively balancing accuracy and speed for industrial production.