DFTNet: Dual Flow Transformer Network for Conveyor Belt Edge Detection

In traditional conveyor belt edge detection methods, contact detection methods have a high cost. At the same time noncontact detection methods have low precision, and the methods based on the convolutional neural network are limited by the local operation features of the convolution operation itself, causing problems such as insufficient perception of long-distance and global information. In order to solve the above problems, a dual flow transformer network (DFTNet) integrating global and local information is proposed for belt edge detection. DFTNet could improve belt edge detection accuracy and suppress the interference of belt image noise. In this paper, the authors have merged the advantages of the traditional convolutional neural network's ability to extract local features and the transformer structure's ability to perceive global and long-distance information. Here, the fusion block is designed as a dual flow encoder-decoder structure, which could better integrate global context information and avoid the disadvantages of a transformer structure pretrained on large datasets. Besides, the structure of the fusion block is designed to be flexible and adjustable. After sufficient experiments on the conveyor belt dataset, the comparative results show that DFTNet can effectively balance accuracy and efficiency and has the best overall performance on belt edge detection tasks, outperforming full convolution methods. The processing image frame rate reaches 53.07 fps, which can meet the real-time requirements of the industry. At the same time, DFTNet can deal with belt edge detection problems in various scenarios, which gives it great practical value.