Industrial inspection is crucial for maintaining quality and safety in industrial processes. Deep learning models have recently demonstrated promising results in such tasks. This paper proposes YOLOX-Ray, an efficient new deep learning architecture tailored for industrial inspection. YOLOX-Ray is based on the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithms and integrates the SimAM attention mechanism for improved feature extraction in the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PAN). Moreover, it also employs the Alpha-IoUcost function for enhanced small-scale object detection. YOLOX-Ray’s performance was assessed in three case studies: hotspot detection, infrastructure crack detection and corrosion detection. The architecture outperforms all other configurations, achievingmAP50values of 89%, 99.6% and 87.7%, respectively. For the most challenging metric,mAP50:95, the achieved values were 44.7%, 66.1% and 51.8%, respectively. A comparative analysis demonstrated the importance of combining the SimAM attention mechanism with Alpha-IoUloss function for optimal performance. In conclusion, YOLOX-Ray’s ability to detect and to locate multi-scale objects in industrial environments presents new opportunities for effective, efficient and sustainable inspection processes across various industries, revolutionizing the field of industrial inspections.