Pixel level pavement crack detection using deep convolutional neural network with residual blocks

Road condition monitoring, such as surface defects and pavement cracks detection, is an important task in road management. Automated road surface defect detection is also a challenging problem in computer vision and machine learning research due to the large variety of pavement crack structures, variable lighting conditions, interfering objects on the road surface such as trashes, fallen tree leaves and branches. In this work, we develop a deep learning-based method for automated road surface defect and pavement crack detection. We design a deep convolutional neural network based on using residual blocks to predict the heatmaps which indicate the location and intensity of defects and cracks. To reduce false detection rates, we couple this heatmap prediction network with a binary classification network which is able to determine if the input image patch is normal or has defects. We test our method on the CFD benchmark dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed network is very effective for pavement crack detection and has more advanced performance than other methods.by Yu HouIncludes bibliographical reference

Road Pavement Crack Detection Using Deep Learning with Synthetic Data

Robust automatic pavement crack detection is critical to automated road condition evaluation. Manual crack detection is extremely time-consuming. Therefore, an automatic road crack detection method is required to boost this process. This study makes literature review of detection issues of road pavement's distress. The paper considers the existing datasets for detection and segmentation distress of road and asphalt pavement. The work presented in this article focuses on deep learning approach based on synthetic training data generation for segmentation of cracks in the driver-view image. A synthetic dataset generation method is presented, and effectiveness of its applicability to the current problem is evaluated. The relevance of the study is emphasized by research on pixel-level automatic damage detection remains a challenging problem, due to heterogeneous pixel intensity, complex crack topology, poor illumination condition, and noisy texture background

Road Crack Detection Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Adaptive Thresholding

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 pixels. Finally, we utilize an adaptive thresholding method to extract the cracks from road surface. The experimental results illustrate that our network can classify images with an accuracy of 99.92%, and the cracks can be successfully extracted from the images using our proposed thresholding algorithm.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposiu

Ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks for automatic pavement crack detection and measurement

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 identify the structure of small cracks with raw images. Secondly, outputs of the individual convolutional neural network model for the ensemble were averaged to produce the final crack probability value of each pixel, which can obtain a predicted probability map. Finally, the predicted morphological features of the cracks were measured by using the skeleton extraction algorithm. To validate the proposed method, some experiments were performed on two public crack databases (CFD and AigleRN) and the results of the different state-of-the-art methods were compared. To evaluate the efficiency of crack detection methods, three parameters were considered: precision (Pr), recall (Re) and F1 score (F1). For the two public databases of pavement images, the proposed method obtained the highest values of the three evaluation parameters: for the CFD database, Pr = 0.9552, Re = 0.9521 and F1 = 0.9533 (which reach values up to 0.5175 higher than the values obtained on the same database with the other methods), for the AigleRN database, Pr = 0.9302, Re = 0.9166 and F1 = 0.9238 (which reach values up to 0.7313 higher than the values obtained on the same database with the other methods). The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods. For crack measurement, the crack length and width can be measure based on different crack types (complex, common, thin, and intersecting cracks.). The results show that the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied for crack measurement

Combining Block-based and Pixel-based Approaches to Improve Crack Detection and Localisation

A variety of civil engineering applications require the identification of cracks in roads and buildings. In such cases, it is frequently helpful for the precise location of cracks to be identified as labelled parts within an image to facilitate precision repair for example. CrackIT is known as a crack detection algorithm that allows a user to choose between a block-based or a pixel-based approach. The block-based approach is noise-tolerant but is not accurate in edge localization while the pixel-based approach gives accurate edge localisation but is not noise-tolerant. We propose a new approach that combines both techniques and retains the advantages of each. The new method is evaluated on three standard crack image datasets. The method was compared with the CrackIT method and three deep learning methods namely, HED, RCF and the FPHB. The new approach outperformed the existing arts and reduced the discretisation errors significantly while still being noise-tolerant

Deep Learning for Crack-Like Object Detection

Cracks are common defects on surfaces of man-made structures such as pavements, bridges, walls of nuclear power plants, ceilings of tunnels, etc. Timely discovering and repairing of the cracks are of great significance and importance for keeping healthy infrastructures and preventing further damages. Traditionally, the cracking inspection was conducted manually which was labor-intensive, time-consuming and costly. For example, statistics from the Central Intelligence Agency show that the world’s road network length has reached 64,285,009 km, of which the United States has 6,586,610 km. It is a huge cost to maintain and upgrade such an immense road network. Thus, fully automatic crack detection has received increasing attention. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the deep learning technique has achieved great success and has been viewed as the most promising way for crack detection. Based on deep learning, this research has solved four important issues existing in crack-like object detection. First, the noise problem caused by the textured background is solved by using a deep classification network to remove the non-crack region before conducting crack detection. Second, the computational efficiency is highly improved. Third, the crack localization accuracy is improved. Fourth, the proposed model is very stable and can be used to deal with a wide range of crack detection tasks. In addition, this research performs a preliminary study about the future AI system, which provides a concept that has potential to realize fully automatic crack detection without human’s intervention