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 functions. As a result, the weights of resized images can be reduced to minimise the information loss. Experiments on images of different crack datasets have been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed HCNN.
BeltCrack: the First Sequential-image Industrial Conveyor Belt Crack Detection Dataset and Its Baseline with Triple-domain Feature Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Suzhou Red Shield Intelligent Manufacturing Co., Ltd.（苏州红盾智能制造有限公司）
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…
Since the convolutional neural networks are often trained with redundant parameters, it is possible to reduce redundant kernels or filters to obtain a compact network without dropping the classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a filter pruning method using the hierarchical group sparse regularization. It is shown in our previous work that the hierarchical group sparse regularization is effective in obtaining sparse networks in which filters connected to unnecessary channels are automatically close to zero. After training the convolutional neural network with the hierarchical group …
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 …
In a deep neural network (DNN), the number of the parameters is usually huge to get high learning performances. For that reason, it costs a lot of memory and substantial computational resources, and also causes overfitting. It is known that some parameters are redundant and can be removed from the network without decreasing performance. Many sparse regularization criteria have been proposed to solve this problem. In a convolutional neural network (CNN), group sparse regularizations are often used to remove unnecessary subsets of the weights, such as filters or channels. When we apply a group s…
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）
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Digital security has been an active area of research interest due to the rapid adaptation of internet infrastructure, the increasing popularity of social media, and digital cameras. Due to inherent differences in working principles to generate an image, different camera brands left behind different intrinsic processing noises which can be used to identify the camera brand. In the last decade, many signal processing and deep learning-based methods have been proposed to identify and isolate this noise from the scene details in an image to detect the source camera brand. One prominent solution is…
EfficientCrackNet: A Lightweight Model for Crack Segmentation
Aligarh Muslim University（阿里格尔穆斯林大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Chengdu University（成都大学）；Monash University Malaysia（莫纳什大学马来西亚分校）；Tohoku University（东北大学）
We propose a convolutional network with hierarchical classifiers for per-pixel semantic segmentation, which is able to be trained on multiple, heterogeneous datasets and exploit their semantic hierarchy. Our network is the first to be simultaneously trained on three different datasets from the intelligent vehicles domain, i.e. Cityscapes, GTSDB and Mapillary Vistas, and is able to handle different semantic level-of-detail, class imbalances, and different annotation types, i.e. dense per-pixel and sparse bounding-box labels. We assess our hierarchical approach, by comparing against flat, non-hi…
Staircase Cascaded Fusion of Lightweight Local Pattern Recognition and Long-Range Dependencies for Structural Crack Segmentation
Engineering Research Center of Learning-Based Intelligent System (Ministry of Education)（基于学习的智能系统工程研究中心（教育部））；Key Laboratory of Computer Vision（计算机视觉重点实验室）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Civil Structure Protection（天津建筑物结构保护重点实验室）；Tianjin Chengjian University（天津城建大学）
Over the past decade, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown remarkable performance in most computer vision tasks. These tasks traditionally use a fixed dataset, and the model, once trained, is deployed as is. Adding new information to such a model presents a challenge due to complex training issues, such as "catastrophic forgetting", and sensitivity to hyper-parameter tuning. However, in this modern world, data is constantly evolving, and our deep learning models are required to adapt to these changes. In this paper, we propose an adaptive hierarchical network structure compose…
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…
Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M University System（德克萨斯农工大学系统普雷里维尤农工大学）
In this paper, we address the issue of how to enhance the generalization performance of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in the early learning stage for image classification. This is motivated by real-time applications that require the generalization performance of CNN to be satisfactory within limited training time. In order to achieve this, a novel hierarchical transfer CNN framework is proposed. It consists of a group of shallow CNNs and a cloud CNN, where the shallow CNNs are trained firstly and then the first layers of the trained shallow CNNs are used to initialize the first layer of …
Finding a template in a search image is an important task underlying many computer vision applications. Recent approaches perform template matching in a deep feature-space, produced by a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is found to provide more tolerance to changes in appearance. In this article we investigate if enhancing the CNN's encoding of shape information can produce more distinguishable features that improve the performance of template matching. This investigation results in a new template matching method that produces state-of-the-art results on a standard benchmark. To confi…
StructDamage:A Large Scale Unified Crack and Surface Defect Dataset for Robust Structural Damage Detection
Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau（凯撒斯劳滕-兰道技术大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）；Intelligentx GmbH；BiogentX；Department of Core Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics ,Osaka Metropolitan University（大阪 Metropolitan 大学信息学研究生院核心信息学系）
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…
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…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center（先进材料加工与分析中心）
In this paper, we utilize deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify the morphology of through-silicon via (TSV) extrusion in three dimensional (3D) integrated circuits (ICs). TSV extrusion is a crucial reliability concern which can deform and crack interconnect layers in 3D ICs and cause device failures. Herein, the white light interferometry (WLI) technique is used to obtain the surface profile of the extruded TSVs. We have developed a program that uses raw data obtained from WLI to create a TSV extrusion morphology dataset, including TSV images with 54x54 pixels that are labeled …
Automated pavement crack detection is a challenging task that has been researched for decades due to the complicated pavement conditions in real world. In this paper, a supervised method based on deep learning is proposed, which has the capability of dealing with different pavement conditions. Specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to learn the structure of the cracks from raw images, without any preprocessing. Small patches are extracted from crack images as inputs to generate a large training database, a CNN is trained and crack detection is modeled as a multi-label class…
Automated pavement crack image segmentation is challenging because of inherent irregular patterns, lighting conditions, and noise in images. Conventional approaches require a substantial amount of feature engineering to differentiate crack regions from non-affected regions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning technique based on a convolutional neural network to perform segmentation tasks on pavement crack images. Our approach requires minimal feature engineering compared to other machine learning techniques. We propose a U-Net-based network architecture in which we replace the encoder wi…
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…
Chongqing Jiaotong University（重庆交通大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院（I2R））；Hunan University（湖南大学）
Structural damage detection has become an interdisciplinary area of interest for various engineering fields, while the available damage detection methods are being in the process of adapting machine learning concepts. Most machine learning based methods heavily depend on extracted ``hand-crafted" features that are manually selected in advance by domain experts and then, fixed. Recently, deep learning has demonstrated remarkable performance on traditional challenging tasks, such as image classification, object detection, etc., due to the powerful feature learning capabilities. This breakthrough…
EEG2GAIT: A Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network for EEG-based Gait Decoding
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Institute of Neural Engineering, Graz University of Technology（技术大学神经工程研究所）；Center for Al in Medicine (C-AlM)（医学人工智能中心）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Twentieth Century Fox（二十世纪福克斯公司）；Starfleet Academy（星际舰队学院）；Tyrell Inc.（泰伦公司）
Fully convolutional network is a powerful tool for per-pixel semantic segmentation/detection. However, it is problematic when coping with crack detection using partially accurate ground truths (GTs): the network may easily converge to the status that treats all the pixels as background (BG) and still achieves a very good loss, named "All Black" phenomenon, due to the unavailability of accurate GTs and the data imbalance. To tackle this problem, we propose crack-patch-only (CPO) supervised generative adversarial learning for end-to-end training, which forces the network to always produce crack-…
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 …
In-situ crack and keyhole pore detection in laser directed energy deposition through acoustic signal and deep learning
Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre (ARTC)（先进再制造与技术中心（ARTC））；School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学机械与宇航工程学院）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech)（新加坡制造技术研究院（SIMTech））；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院）
University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；Kharazmi University（哈拉兹米大学）；California Polytechnic State University（加州州立理工大学）
Development of deep learning techniques to analyse image data is an expansive and emerging field. The benefits of tracking, identifying, measuring, and sorting features of interest from image data has endless applications for saving cost, time, and improving safety. Much research has been conducted on classifying cracks from image data using deep convolutional neural networks; however, minimal research has been conducted to study the efficacy of network performance when noisy images are used. This paper will address the problem and is dedicated to investigating the influence of image noise on …
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Advanced Institute of Information Technology, Peking University（北京大学前沿信息研究院）；University of International Business and Economics（对外经济贸易大学）；Research Center on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院虚拟经济与数据科学研究中心）
Pixel-level road crack detection has always been a challenging task in intelligent transportation systems. Due to the external environments, such as weather, light, and other factors, pavement cracks often present low contrast, poor continuity, and different sizes in length and width. However, most of the existing studies pay less attention to crack data under different situations. Meanwhile, recent algorithms based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have promoted the development of cutting-edge models for crack detection. Nevertheless, they usually focus on complex models for good …
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 fu…
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. …
Fraunhofer Institut für Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所）；Technische Universität Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）
Concrete is the standard construction material for buildings, bridges, and roads. As safety plays a central role in the design, monitoring, and maintenance of such constructions, it is important to understand the cracking behavior of concrete. Computed tomography captures the microstructure of building materials and allows to study crack initiation and propagation. Manual segmentation of crack surfaces in large 3d images is not feasible. In this paper, automatic crack segmentation methods for 3d images are reviewed and compared. Classical image processing methods (edge detection filters, templ…
Image classification is considered, and a hierarchical max-pooling model with additional local pooling is introduced. Here the additional local pooling enables the hierachical model to combine parts of the image which have a variable relative distance towards each other. Various convolutional neural network image classifiers are introduced and compared in view of their rate of convergence. The finite sample size performance of the estimates is analyzed by applying them to simulated and real data.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Open-ended video question answering aims to automatically generate the natural-language answer from referenced video contents according to the given question. Currently, most existing approaches focus on short-form video question answering with multi-modal recurrent encoder-decoder networks. Although these works have achieved promising performance, they may still be ineffectively applied to long-form video question answering due to the lack of long-range dependency modeling and the suffering from the heavy computational cost. To tackle these problems, we propose a fast Hierarchical Convolution…
CONNECT Centre, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学CONNECT中心）；University of Sindh（信德大学）；Signy Advanced Technologies（西格尼先进技术公司）；Indian Institute of Technology, Dehli（印度理工学院德里分校）；King Faisal University（费萨尔国王大学）
The current COVID-19 pandemic has motivated the researchers to use artificial intelligence techniques for a potential alternative to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) due to the limited scale of testing. The chest X-ray (CXR) is one of the alternatives to achieve fast diagnosis but the unavailability of large-scale annotated data makes the clinical implementation of machine learning-based COVID detection difficult. Another issue is the usage of ImageNet pre-trained networks which does not extract reliable feature representations from medical images. In this paper, we pro…
Lafayette College（拉斐特学院）；University of Washington - Tacoma（华盛顿大学塔科马分校）；University de Pernambuco（伯南布哥大学）
Due to the environmental impacts caused by the construction industry, repurposing existing buildings and making them more energy-efficient has become a high-priority issue. However, a legitimate concern of land developers is associated with the buildings' state of conservation. For that reason, infrared thermography has been used as a powerful tool to characterize these buildings' state of conservation by detecting pathologies, such as cracks and humidity. Thermal cameras detect the radiation emitted by any material and translate it into temperature-color-coded images. Abnormal temperature cha…
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…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
Generating a robust representation of the environment is a crucial ability of learning agents. Deep learning based methods have greatly improved perception systems but still fail in challenging situations. These failures are often not solvable on the basis of a single image. In this work, we present a parameter-efficient temporal filtering concept which extends an existing single-frame segmentation model to work with multiple frames. The resulting recurrent architecture temporally filters representations on all abstraction levels in a hierarchical manner, while decoupling temporal dependencies…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）
Recently, the soft attention mechanism, which was originally proposed in language processing, has been applied in computer vision tasks like image captioning. This paper presents improvements to the soft attention model by combining a convolutional LSTM with a hierarchical system architecture to recognize action categories in videos. We call this model the Convolutional Hierarchical Attention Model (CHAM). The model applies a convolutional operation inside the LSTM cell and an attention map generation process to recognize actions. The hierarchical architecture of this model is able to explicit…
Deep Learning Framework for Infrastructure Maintenance: Crack Detection and High-Resolution Imaging of Infrastructure Surfaces
Maseeh Department of Civil Architectural and Environmental Engineering（梅塞德斯土木建筑与环境工程系）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Ingram School of Engineering（英格拉姆工程学院）；Texas State University（德克萨斯州立大学）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering（土木与环境工程系）
A large amount of research on Convolutional Neural Networks has focused on flat Classification in the multi-class domain. In the real world, many problems are naturally expressed as problems of hierarchical classification, in which the classes to be predicted are organized in a hierarchy of classes. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for hierarchical classification of images, introducing a stack of deep linear layers with cross-entropy loss functions and center loss combined. The proposed architecture can extend any neural network model and simultaneously optimizes loss functions to …
Crack detection is of great significance for monitoring the integrity and well-being of the infrastructure such as bridges and underground pipelines, which are harsh environments for people to access. In recent years, computer vision techniques have been applied in detecting cracks in concrete structures. However, they suffer from variances in light conditions and shadows, lacking robustness and resulting in many false positives. To address the uncertainty in vision, human inspectors actively touch the surface of the structures, guided by vision, which has not been explored in autonomous crack…
Prefectural University of Hiroshima（广岛县立大学）；Mitsui Consultants Co. Ltd.（三井咨询有限公司）
We have developed an adaptive structural Deep Belief Network (Adaptive DBN) that finds an optimal network structure in a self-organizing manner during learning. The Adaptive DBN is the hierarchical architecture where each layer employs Adaptive Restricted Boltzmann Machine (Adaptive RBM). The Adaptive RBM can find the appropriate number of hidden neurons during learning. The proposed method was applied to a concrete image benchmark data set SDNET2018 for crack detection. The dataset contains about 56,000 crack images for three types of concrete structures: bridge decks, walls, and paved roads.…
Compared with contact detection techniques, pavement crack identification with visual images via deep learning algorithms has the advantages of not being limited by the material of object to be detected, fast speed and low cost. The fundamental frameworks and typical model architectures of transfer learning (TL), encoder-decoder (ED), generative adversarial networks (GAN), and their common modules were first reviewed, and then the evolution of convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone models and GAN models were summarized. The crack classification, segmentation performance, and effect were t…
