<p>Defect recognition is crucial in steel production and quality control, but performing this detection task accurately presents significant challenges. ConvNeXt, a model based on self-attention mechanism, has shown excellent performance in image classification tasks. To further enhance ConvNeXt’s ability to classify defects on steel surfaces, we propose a network architecture called ESG-ConvNeXt. First, in the image processing stage, we introduce a serial multi-attention mechanism approach. This method fully leverages the extracted information and improves image information retention by combining the strengths of each module. Second, we design a parallel multi-scale residual module to adaptively extract diverse discriminative features from the input image, thereby enhancing the model’s feature extraction capability. Finally, in the downsampling stage, we incorporate a PReLU activation function to mitigate the problem of neuron death during downsampling. We conducted extensive experiments using the NEU-CLS-64 steel surface defect dataset, and the results demonstrate that our model outperforms other methods in terms of detection performance, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 97.5%. Through ablation experiments, we validated the effectiveness of each module; through visualization experiments, our model exhibited strong classification capability. Additionally, experiments on the X-SDD dataset confirm that the ESG-ConvNeXt network achieves solid classification results. Therefore, the proposed ESG-ConvNeXt network shows great potential in steel surface defect classification.</p>