A Spectrum-Driven Hierarchical Learning Network for Aero-Engine Defect Segmentation
Open Access
- 25 April 2026
- journal article
- research article
- Published by MDPI AG in Computation
- Vol. 14 (5) , 99
Abstract
Aero-engine defects often exhibit micro-scale and high-frequency characteristics under complex metallic textures, which makes precise segmentation difficult. Most existing pixel-level methods rely on spatial-domain modeling and lack frequency-domain decoupling. As a result, high-frequency details are easily hidden by low-frequency background information. In addition, repeated downsampling weakens the representation of fine-grained structures, leading to inaccurate boundary localization and limited robustness. To address these issues, a spectrum-driven hierarchical learning network is proposed for aero-engine defect segmentation. First, a dual-band spectral module is constructed using the discrete cosine transform to separate high-frequency and low-frequency components, providing stable and physically meaningful frequency-domain priors for the network. Second, a detail-guided module is designed where high-frequency features adaptively guide skip connections, compensating information loss during encoding and improving boundary recovery. Furthermore, a low-frequency-driven region-aware modeling module is developed. The internal defect regions, boundary areas, and background regions are modeled hierarchically. A dynamic hyper-kernel generation mechanism performs region-sensitive convolutional modeling, improving adaptation to complex structural variations. Extensive experiments on the Turbo19 and NEU-Seg datasets demonstrate that the proposed method produces accurate defect boundaries and achieves mIoU scores of 89.82% and 91.44%, improving over the second-best method by 5.22% and 4.42%, respectively.Keywords
Funding Information
- China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2025M771359)
- Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (JJ2025QC0495)
- Open Fund Project of the Ministry of Education Key Laboratory (VCAME202502)
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2572025BR11)
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