Airport-FOD3S: A Three-Stage Detection-Driven Framework for Realistic Foreign Object Debris Synthesis

Traditional Foreign Object Debris (FOD) detection methods face challenges such as difficulties in large-size data acquisition and the ineffective application of detection algorithms with high accuracy. In this paper, image data augmentation was performed using generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, generating images of monitoring areas under different environmental conditions and FOD images of varied types. Additionally, a three-stage image blending method considering size transformation, a seamless process, and style transfer was proposed. The image quality of different blending methods was quantitatively evaluated using metrics such as structural similarity index and peak signal-to-noise ratio, as well as Depthanything. Finally, object detection models with a similarity distance strategy (SimD), including Faster R-CNN, YOLOv8, and YOLOv11, were tested on the dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that realistic FOD data were effectively generated. The Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the synthesized image by the proposed three-stage image blending method outperformed the other methods, reaching 0.99 and 45 dB. YOLOv11 with SimD trained on the augmented dataset achieved the mAP of 86.95%. Based on the results, it could be concluded that both data augmentation and SimD significantly improved the accuracy of FOD detection.