Automatic crack detection on pavement surfaces is an important research field in the scope of developing an intelligent transportation infrastructure system. In this paper, a cost effective solution for road crack inspection by mounting commercial grade sport camera, GoPro, on the rear of the moving vehicle is introduced. Also, a novel method called ConnCrack combining conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network and connectivity maps is proposed for road crack detection. In this method, a 121-layer densely connected neural network with deconvolution layers for multi-level feature fusion is used as generator, and a 5-layer fully convolutional network is used as discriminator. To overcome the scattered output issue related to deconvolution layers, connectivity maps are introduced to represent the crack information within the proposed ConnCrack. The proposed method is tested on a publicly available dataset as well our collected data. The results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other existing methods in terms of precision, recall and F1 score.
Unity-Drive Technology Inc（深圳一清科技有限公司）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Road Maintenance Technologies（道路养护技术国家工程研究中心）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Crack is one of the most common road distresses which may pose road safety hazards. Generally, crack detection is performed by either certified inspectors or structural engineers. This task is, however, time-consuming, subjective and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel road crack detection algorithm based on deep learning and adaptive image segmentation. Firstly, a deep convolutional neural network is trained to determine whether an image contains cracks or not. The images containing cracks are then smoothed using bilateral filtering, which greatly minimizes the number of noisy …
CrackSegFlow: Controllable Flow Matching Synthesis for Generalizable Crack Segmentation with a 50K Image-Mask Benchmark
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana--Champaign（土木与环境工程系，格拉inger工程学院，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Department of Computer Science, Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana--Champaign（计算机科学系，格拉inger工程学院，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University（东北大学信息科学研究生院）；RIKEN Center for AIP（理化学研究所人工智能中心）
In this study, we consider the problem of detecting cracks from the image of a concrete surface for automated inspection of infrastructure, such as bridges. Its overall accuracy is determined by how accurately thin cracks with sub-pixel widths can be detected. Our interest is in making it possible to detect cracks close to the limit of thinness if it can be defined. Toward this end, we first propose a method for training a CNN to make it detect cracks more accurately than humans while training them on human-annotated labels. To achieve this seemingly impossible goal, we intentionally lower the…
Wind energy is expected to be one of the leading ways to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement but it in turn heavily depends on effective management of its operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. Blade failures account for one-third of all O&M costs thus making accurate detection of blade damages, especially cracks, very important for sustained operations and cost savings. Traditionally, damage inspection has been a completely manual process thus making it subjective, error-prone, and time-consuming. Hence in this work, we bring more objectivity, scalability, and repeatability in our damag…
Vehicular Road Crack Detection with Deep Learning: A New Online Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Existing Algorithms
Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学智能自主系统前沿科学中心）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University（东华大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）
Shantou University（汕头大学）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；Pusan National University（釜山国立大学）
Inspired by the development of deep learning in computer vision and object detection, the proposed algorithm considers an encoder-decoder architecture with hierarchical feature learning and dilated convolution, named U-Hierarchical Dilated Network (U-HDN), to perform crack detection in an end-to-end method. Crack characteristics with multiple context information are automatically able to learn and perform end-to-end crack detection. Then, a multi-dilation module embedded in an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed. The crack features of multiple context sizes can be integrated into the mult…
With the advent of self-driving cars and autonomous robots, it is imperative to detect road impairments like cracks and potholes and to perform necessary evading maneuvers to ensure fluid journey for on-board passengers or equipment. We propose a fully autonomous robust real-time road crack and pothole detection algorithm which can be deployed on any GPU based conventional processing boards with an associated camera. The approach is based on a deep neural net architecture which detects cracks and potholes using texture and spatial features. We also propose pre-processing methods which ensure r…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Minjiang University（闽江学院）
Automatic crack detection and segmentation play a significant role in the whole system of unmanned aerial vehicle inspections. In this paper, we have implemented a deep learning framework for crack detection based on classical network architectures including Alexnet, VGG, and Resnet. Moreover, inspired by the feature pyramid network architecture, a hierarchical convolutional neural network (CNN) deep learning framework which is efficient in crack segmentation is also proposed, and its performance of it is compared with other state-of-the-art network architecture. We have summarized the existin…
Bridges are an essential part of the transportation infrastructure and need to be monitored periodically. Visual inspections by dedicated teams have been one of the primary tools in structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridge structures. However, such conventional methods have certain shortcomings. Manual inspections may be challenging in harsh environments and are commonly biased in nature. In the last decade, camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used for visual inspections; however, the task of automatically extracting useful information from raw images is still …
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）；University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）
This paper presents a novel setup for automatic visual inspection of cracks in ceramic tile as well as studies the effect of various classifiers and height-varying illumination conditions for this task. The intuition behind this setup is that cracks can be better visualized under specific lighting conditions than others. Our setup, which is designed for field work with constraints in its maximum dimensions, can acquire images for crack detection with multiple lighting conditions using the illumination sources placed at multiple heights. Crack detection is then performed by classifying patches …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of International Business and Economics（对外经济贸易大学）
Numerous detection problems in computer vision, including road crack detection, suffer from exceedingly foreground-background imbalance. Fortunately, modification of loss function appears to solve this puzzle once and for all. In this paper, we propose a pixel-based adaptive weighted cross-entropy loss in conjunction with Jaccard distance to facilitate high-quality pixel-level road crack detection. Our work profoundly demonstrates the influence of loss functions on detection outcomes, and sheds light on the sophisticated consecutive improvements in the realm of crack detection. Specifically, t…
Road infrastructure maintenance inspection is typically a labour-intensive and critical task to ensure the safety of all the road users. In this work, we propose a detailed methodology to use state-of-the-art techniques in artificial intelligence and computer vision to automate a sizeable portion of the maintenance inspection subtasks and reduce the labour costs. The proposed methodology uses state-of-the-art computer vision techniques such as object detection and semantic segmentation to automate inspections on primary road structures such as the road surface, markings, barriers (guardrails) …
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；University of Macedonia（马其顿大学）
Recent studies indicate that deep learning plays a crucial role in the automated visual inspection of road infrastructures. However, current learning schemes are static, implying no dynamic adaptation to users' feedback. To address this drawback, we present a few-shot learning paradigm for the automated segmentation of road cracks, which is based on a U-Net architecture with recurrent residual and attention modules (R2AU-Net). The retraining strategy dynamically fine-tunes the weights of the U-Net as a few new rectified samples are being fed into the classifier. Extensive experiments show that…
Tongji University（同济大学）；Continental AG（大陆集团）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Road damage is an inconvenience and a safety hazard, severely affecting vehicle condition, driving comfort, and traffic safety. The traditional manual visual road inspection process is pricey, dangerous, exhausting, and cumbersome. Also, manual road inspection results are qualitative and subjective, as they depend entirely on the inspector's personal experience. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need for automated road inspection systems. This chapter first compares the five most common road damage types. Then, 2-D/3-D road imaging systems are discussed. Finally, state-of-the-art machine …
Shantou University（汕头大学）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；Pusan National University（釜山国立大学）
Automated pavement crack detection and measurement are important road issues. Agencies have to guarantee the improvement of road safety. Conventional crack detection and measurement algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and low efficiency. Therefore, recently, innovative algorithms have received increased attention from researchers. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (without a pooling layer) based on probability fusion for automated pavement crack detection and measurement. Specifically, an ensemble of convolutional neural networks was employed to iden…
WP-CrackNet: A Collaborative Adversarial Learning Framework for End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Road Crack Detection
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（电子信息工程学院，智能自主系统上海研究院，同济大学）；School of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University（物联网工程学院，江南大学）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（电气电子工程学院，南洋理工大学）
Robust Lightweight Crack Classification for Real-Time UAV Bridge Inspection
Bay Area Super Bridge Maintenance Technology Center, Guangdong Provincial Highway Construction Co., Ltd., Guangdong, China（湾区超级桥梁维护技术中心、广东省高速公路建设有限公司、广东，中国）；Guangdong AIHISUN Technology Co., Ltd., Guangdong, China（广东AIHISUN技术有限公司、广东，中国）
Curtin University（科廷大学）；Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)（光州科学技术院）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
In the past few years, the performance of road defect detection has been remarkably improved thanks to advancements on various studies on computer vision and deep learning. Although a large-scale and well-annotated datasets enhance the performance of detecting road pavement defects to some extent, it is still challengeable to derive a model which can perform reliably for various road conditions in practice, because it is intractable to construct a dataset considering diverse road conditions and defect patterns. To end this, we propose an unsupervised approach to detecting road defects, using A…
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) gives a great opportunity to develop an autonomous devices. The contribution of this work is an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model and its implementation for the detection of road cracks, potholes, and yellow lane in the road. The purpose of yellow lane detection and tracking is to realize autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by following yellow lane while detecting and reporting the road cracks and potholes to the server through WIFI or 5G medium. The fabrication of own data set is a hectic and time-consuming task. …
National Institute of Technology Durgapur（杜尔加普尔国家理工学院）
Due to cyclic loading and fatigue stress cracks are generated, which affect the safety of any civil infrastructure. Nowadays machine vision is being used to assist us for appropriate maintenance, monitoring and inspection of concrete structures by partial replacement of human-conducted onsite inspections. The current study proposes a crack detection method based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for detection of concrete cracks without explicitly calculating the defect features. In the course of the study, a database of 3200 labelled images with concrete cracks has been created, where…
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；UrbanX Technologies, Inc.（UrbanX科技公司）
The data article describes the Road Damage Dataset, RDD2022, which comprises 47,420 road images from six countries, Japan, India, the Czech Republic, Norway, the United States, and China. The images have been annotated with more than 55,000 instances of road damage. Four types of road damage, namely longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes, are captured in the dataset. The annotated dataset is envisioned for developing deep learning-based methods to detect and classify road damage automatically. The dataset has been released as a part of the Crowd sensing-based Ro…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are expected to replace human in hazardous tasks of surface inspection due to their flexibility in operating space and capability of collecting high quality visual data. In this study, we propose enhanced hierarchical convolutional neural networks (HCNN) to detect cracks from image data collected by UAVs. Unlike traditional HCNN, here a set of branch networks is utilised to reduce the obscuration in the down-sampling process. Moreover, the feature preserving blocks combine the current and previous terms from the convolutional blocks to provide input to the loss f…
Automated Road Crack Localization to Guide Highway Maintenance
HeiGIT at Heidelberg University（海德堡大学HeiGIT）；GIScience Research Group, Heidelberg University（海德堡大学地理信息科学研究组）；Interdisciplinary Centre of Scientific Computing (IWR), Heidelberg University（海德堡大学跨学科科学计算中心）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）
Advanced Research Lab, NavInfo Europe（四维图新欧洲高级研究实验室）
Road infrastructure maintenance inspection is typically a labor-intensive and critical task to ensure the safety of all road users. Existing state-of-the-art techniques in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for object detection and segmentation help automate a huge chunk of this task given adequate annotated data. However, annotating videos from scratch is cost-prohibitive. For instance, it can take an annotator several days to annotate a 5-minute video recorded at 30 FPS. Hence, we propose an automated labelling pipeline by leveraging techniques like few-shot learning and out-of-distribution detect…
Establishing Reality-Virtuality Interconnections in Urban Digital Twins for Superior Intelligent Road Inspection and Simulation
College of Electronics & Information Engineering, Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Autonomous Systems, and Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China（电子与信息工程学院，上海智能自主系统研究院，智能自主系统国家重点实验室，智能自主系统前沿科学中心，同济大学，上海）
The condition assessment of road surfaces is essential to ensure their serviceability while still providing maximum road traffic safety. This paper presents a robust stereo vision system embedded in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The perspective view of the target image is first transformed into the reference view, and this not only improves the disparity accuracy, but also reduces the algorithm's computational complexity. The cost volumes generated from stereo matching are then filtered using a bilateral filter. The latter has been proved to be a feasible solution for the functional minimi…
This study presents an inspecting system using real-time control unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to investigate structural surfaces. The system operates under favourable weather conditions to inspect a target structure, which is the Wentworth light rail base structure in this study. The system includes a drone, a GoPro HERO4 camera, a controller and a mobile phone. The drone takes off the ground manually in the testing field to collect the data requiring for later analysis. The images are taken through HERO 4 camera and then transferred in real time to the remote processing unit such as a grou…
Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche ‘E. Magenes’ - CNR（意大利国家研究委员会“E. 马涅斯”应用数学与信息技术研究所）；University of Chile（智利大学）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市科学大学）；Viet Nam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）；John von Neumann Institute（约翰·冯·诺依曼研究所）
This paper describes the methods submitted for evaluation to the SHREC 2022 track on pothole and crack detection in the road pavement. A total of 7 different runs for the semantic segmentation of the road surface are compared, 6 from the participants plus a baseline method. All methods exploit Deep Learning techniques and their performance is tested using the same environment (i.e.: a single Jupyter notebook). A training set, composed of 3836 semantic segmentation image/mask pairs and 797 RGB-D video clips collected with the latest depth cameras was made available to the participants. The meth…
Temple University（天普大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；TuSimple（图森未来）
Pavement crack detection is a critical task for insuring road safety. Manual crack detection is extremely time-consuming. Therefore, an automatic road crack detection method is required to boost this progress. However, it remains a challenging task due to the intensity inhomogeneity of cracks and complexity of the background, e.g., the low contrast with surrounding pavements and possible shadows with similar intensity. Inspired by recent advances of deep learning in computer vision, we propose a novel network architecture, named Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network (FPHBN), for pa…
Crack detection plays a key role in automated pavement inspection. Although a large number of algorithms have been developed in recent years to further boost performance, there are still remaining challenges in practice, due to the complexity of pavement images. To further accelerate the development and identify the remaining challenges, this paper conducts a comparison study to evaluate the performance of the state of the art crack detection algorithms quantitatively and objectively. A more comprehensive annotated pavement crack dataset (NHA12D) that contains images with different viewpoints …
From Classification to Segmentation with Explainable AI: A Study on Crack Detection and Growth Monitoring
Intelligent Maintenance and Operations Systems (IMOS), EPFL（智能维护与运营系统研究所（IMOS），洛桑联邦理工学院）；Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation (ECEO), EPFL（环境计算科学与地球观测研究所（ECEO），洛桑联邦理工学院）
Lamar University（拉马尔大学）；Stanley Black & Decker（史丹利百得）
Pavement condition evaluation is essential to time the preventative or rehabilitative actions and control distress propagation. Failing to conduct timely evaluations can lead to severe structural and financial loss of the infrastructure and complete reconstructions. Automated computer-aided surveying measures can provide a database of road damage patterns and their locations. This database can be utilized for timely road repairs to gain the minimum cost of maintenance and the asphalt's maximum durability. This paper introduces a deep learning-based surveying scheme to analyze the image-based d…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；UTS - VNU Joint Technology and Innovation Research Centre（悉尼科技大学-越南国立大学联合技术创新研究中心）；University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi（河内越南国立大学工程技术大学）
Drone imagery is increasingly used in automated inspection for infrastructure surface defects, especially in hazardous or unreachable environments. In machine vision, the key to crack detection rests with robust and accurate algorithms for image processing. To this end, this paper proposes a deep learning approach using hierarchical convolutional neural networks with feature preservation (HCNNFP) and an intercontrast iterative thresholding algorithm for image binarization. First, a set of branch networks is proposed, wherein the output of previous convolutional blocks is half-sizedly concatena…
This paper proposes a thresholding approach for crack detection in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based infrastructure inspection system. The proposed algorithm performs recursively on the intensity histogram of UAV-taken images to exploit their crack-pixels appearing at the low intensity interval. A quantified criterion of interclass contrast is proposed and employed as an object cost and stop condition for the recursive process. Experiments on different datasets show that our algorithm outperforms different segmentation approaches to accurately extract crack features of some commercial bui…
Photovoltaic cells are electronic devices that convert light energy to electricity, forming the backbone of solar energy harvesting systems. An essential step in the manufacturing process for photovoltaic cells is visual quality inspection using electroluminescence imaging to identify defects such as cracks, finger interruptions, and broken cells. A big challenge faced by industry in photovoltaic cell visual inspection is the fact that it is currently done manually by human inspectors, which is extremely time consuming, laborious, and prone to human error. While deep learning approaches holds …
Automatic crack detection is a critical task that has the potential to drastically reduce labor-intensive building and road inspections currently being done manually. Recent studies in this field have significantly improved the detection accuracy. However, the methods often heavily rely on costly annotation processes. In addition, to handle a wide variety of target domains, new batches of annotations are usually required for each new environment. This makes the data annotation cost a significant bottleneck when deploying crack detection systems in real life. To resolve this issue, we formulate…
SenseTime（商汤科技）；School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science（上海工程技术大学电子与电气工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University（东华大学计算机科学与技术学院）
University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Amazon（亚马逊公司）
Pavement conditions are a critical aspect of asset management and directly affect safety. This study introduces a deep neural network method called U-Net for pavement crack segmentation based on drone-captured images to reduce the cost and time needed for airport runway inspection. The proposed approach can also be used for highway pavement conditions assessment during off-peak periods when there are few vehicles on the road. In this study, runway pavement images are collected using drone at various heights from the Fitchburg Municipal Airport (FMA) in Massachusetts to evaluate their quality a…
Pixel-level crack segmentation is widely studied due to its high impact on building and road inspections. While recent studies have made significant improvements in accuracy, they typically heavily depend on pixel-level crack annotations, which are time-consuming to obtain. In earlier work, we proposed to reduce the annotation cost bottleneck by reformulating the crack segmentation problem as a weakly-supervised problem -- i.e. the annotation process is expedited by sacrificing the annotation quality. The loss in annotation quality was remedied by refining the inference with per-pixel brightne…
