Surface cracks are a very common indicator of potential structural faults.
Their early detection and monitoring is an important factor in structural
health monitoring. Left untreated, they can grow in size over time and require
expensive repairs or maintenance. With recent advances in computer vision and
deep learning algorithms, the automatic detection and segmentation of cracks
for this monitoring process have become a major topic of interest. This review
aims to give researchers an overview of the published work within the field of
crack analysis algorithms that make use of deep learning. It outlines the
various tasks that are solved through applying computer vision algorithms to
surface cracks in a structural health monitoring setting and also provides
in-depth reviews of recent fully, semi and unsupervised approaches that perform
crack classification, detection, segmentation and quantification. Additionally,
this review also highlights popular datasets used for cracks and the metrics
that are used to evaluate the performance of those algorithms. Finally,
potential research gaps are outlined and further research directions are
provided
