• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.65-74
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• 2021

In order to efficiently inspect rapidly increasing old tunnels in many well-developed countries, many inspection methodologies have been proposed using imaging equipment and image processing. However, most of the existing methodologies evaluated their performance on a clean concrete surface with a limited area where other objects do not exist. Therefore, this paper proposes a 6-step framework for tunnel crack detection deep learning model development. The proposed method is mainly based on negative sample (non-crack object) training and Cascade Mask R-CNN. The proposed framework consists of six steps: searching for cracks in images captured from real tunnels, labeling cracks in pixel level, training a deep learning model, collecting non-crack objects, retraining the deep learning model with the collected non-crack objects, and constructing final training dataset. To implement the proposed framework, Cascade Mask R-CNN, an instance segmentation model, was trained with 1561 general crack images and 206 non-crack images. In order to examine the applicability of the trained model to the real-world tunnel crack detection, field testing is conducted on tunnel spans with a length of about 200m where electric wires and lights are prevalent. In the experimental result, the trained model showed 99% precision and 92% recall, which shows the excellent field applicability of the proposed framework.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.583-598
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• 2022

As human-based tunnel inspections are affected by the subjective judgment of the inspector, making continuous history management difficult. There is a lot of deep learning-based automatic crack detection research recently. However, the large public crack datasets used in most studies differ significantly from those in tunnels. Also, additional work is required to build sophisticated crack labels in current tunnel evaluation. Therefore, we present a method to improve crack detection performance by inputting existing datasets into a deep learning model. We evaluate and compare the performance of deep learning models trained by combining existing tunnel datasets, high-quality tunnel datasets, and public crack datasets. As a result, DeepLabv3+ with Cross-Entropy loss function performed best when trained on both public datasets, patchwise classification, and oversampled tunnel datasets. In the future, we expect to contribute to establishing a plan to efficiently utilize the tunnel image acquisition system's data for deep learning model learning.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.555-567
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• 2023

The cracks in the tunnel are currently determined through visual inspections conducted by inspectors based on images acquired using tunnel imaging acquisition systems. This labor-intensive approach, relying on inspectors, has inherent limitations as it is subject to their subjective judgments. Recently research efforts have actively explored the use of deep learning to automatically detect tunnel cracks. However, most studies utilize public datasets or lack sufficient objectivity in the analysis process, making it challenging to apply them effectively in practical operations. In this study, we selected test datasets consisting of images in the same format as those obtained from the actual inspection system to perform an objective evaluation of deep learning models. Additionally, we introduced ensemble techniques to complement the strengths and weaknesses of the deep learning models, thereby improving the accuracy of crack detection. As a result, we achieved high recall rates of 80%, 88%, and 89% for cracks with sizes of 0.2 mm, 0.3 mm, and 0.5 mm, respectively, in the test images. In addition, the crack detection result of deep learning included numerous cracks that the inspector could not find. if cracks are detected with sufficient accuracy in a more objective evaluation by selecting images from other tunnels that were not used in this study, it is judged that deep learning will be able to be introduced to facility safety inspection.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.549-558
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• 2021

In order to keep infrastructures such as tunnels and underground facilities safe, cracks of concrete lining in tunnel should be detected by regular inspections. Since regular inspections are accomplished through manual efforts using maintenance lift vehicles, it brings about traffic jam, exposes works to dangerous circumstances, and deteriorates consistency of crack inspection data. This study aims to provide methodology to automatically extract cracks from tunnel concrete lining images generated by the existing tunnel image acquisition system. Specifically, we train a deep learning based semantic segmentation model with open dataset, and evaluate its performance with the dataset from the existing tunnel image acquisition system. In particular, we compare the model performance in case of using all of a public dataset, subset of the public dataset which are related to tunnel surfaces, and the tunnel-related subset with negative examples. As a result, the model trained using the tunnel-related subset with negative examples reached the best performance. In the future, we expect that this research can be used for planning efficient model training strategy for crack detection.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.19-28
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• 2007

Tunnel management is a time-consuming and expensive task. In particular, visual analysis of tunnel inspection often requires extended time and cost and shows problems on data gathering, storage and analysis. This study proposes a new approach to extract information for tunnel management by using a laser scanning technology. A prototype tunnel laser scanner developed was used to obtain point clouds of a railway tunnel surface. Initial processing of laser scanning data was to separate those laser pulses returned from the installations attached to tunnel liner using radiometric and geometric characteristics of laser returns. Once the laser returns from the installations were separated and removed, physically damaged parts on tunnel lining are detected. Based on the plane formed by laser scanner data, damaged parts are detected by analysis of proximity. The algorithms presented in this study successfully detect the physically damaged parts which can be verified by the digital photography of the corresponding location on the tunnel surface.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.515-528
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• 2020

Underground concrete structures are usually designed to be used for decades, but in recent years, many of them are nearing their original life expectancy. As a result, it is necessary to promptly inspect and repair the structure, since it can cause lost of fundamental functions and bring unexpected problems. Therefore, personnel-based inspections and repairs have been underway for maintenance of underground structures, but nowadays, objective inspection technologies have been actively developed through the fusion of deep learning and image process. In particular, various researches have been conducted on developing a concrete crack detection algorithm based on supervised learning. Most of these studies requires a large amount of image data, especially, label images. In order to secure those images, it takes a lot of time and labor in reality. To resolve this problem, we introduce a method to increase the accuracy of crack area detection, improved by 0.25% on average by applying adversarial learning in this paper. The adversarial learning consists of a segmentation neural network and a discriminator neural network, and it is an algorithm that improves recognition performance by generating a virtual label image in a competitive structure. In this study, an efficient deep neural network learning method was proposed using this method, and it is expected to be used for accurate crack detection in the future.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.145-154
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• 2018

The damage investigation and inspection methods performed in concrete facilities such as bridges, tunnels, retaining walls and so on, are usually visually examined by the inspector using the surveying tool in the field. These methods highly depend on the subjectivity of the inspector, which may reduce the objectivity and reliability of the record. Therefore, the new image processing techniques are necessary in order to automatically detect the cracks and objectively analyze the characteristics of cracks. In this study, deep learning and image processing technique were developed to detect cracks and analyze characteristics in images for concrete facilities. Two-stage image processing pipeline was proposed to obtain crack segmentation and its characteristics. The performance of the method was tested using various crack images with a label and the results showed over 90% of accuracy on crack classification and segmentation. Finally, the crack characteristics (length and thickness) of the crack image pictured from the field were analyzed, and the performance of the developed technique was verified by comparing the actual measured values and errors.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.513-524
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• 2022

Recently, detecting damages of civil infrastructures from digital images using deep learning technology became a very popular research topic. In order to adapt those methodologies to the field, it is essential to explain robustness of deep learning models. Our research points out that the existing pixel-based deep learning model evaluation metrics are not sufficient for detecting cracks since cracks have linear appearance, and proposes a new evaluation methodology to explain crack segmentation deep learning model more rationally. Specifically, we design, implement and validate a methodology to generate tolerance buffer alongside skeletonized ground truth data and prediction results to consider overall similarity of topology of the ground truth and the prediction rather than pixel-wise accuracy. We could overcome over-estimation or under-estimation problem of crack segmentation model evaluation through using our methodology, and we expect that our methodology can explain crack segmentation deep learning models better.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.253-263
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• 2021

Concrete structures are damaged by aging and external environmental factors. This type of damage is to appear in the form of cracks, to proceed in the form of spalling. Such concrete damage can act as the main cause of reducing the original design bearing capacity of the structure, and negatively affect the stability of the structure. If such damage continues, it may lead to a safety accident in the future, thus proper repair and reinforcement are required. To this end, an accurate and objective condition inspection of the structure must be performed, and for this inspection, a sensor technology capable of detecting damage area is required. For this reason, we propose a deep learning-based image processing algorithm that can detect spalling. To develop this, 298 spalling images were obtained, of which 253 images were used for training, and the remaining 45 images were used for testing. In addition, an improved loss function and data augmentation technique were applied to improve the detection performance. As a result, the detection performance of concrete spalling showed a mean intersection over union of 80.19%. In conclusion, we developed an algorithm to detect concrete spalling through a deep learning-based image processing technique, with an improved loss function and data augmentation technique. This technology is expected to be utilized for accurate inspection and diagnosis of structures in the future.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.374-384
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• 2021

In this study, we propose a new approach for automatic fracture detection in CT scan images of rock specimens. This approach is built on top of two-stage object detection deep learning algorithm called Faster R-CNN with a major modification of using rotated bounding box. The use of rotated bounding box plays a key role in the future work to overcome several inherent difficulties of fracture segmentation relating to the heterogeneity of uninterested background (i.e., minerals) and the variation in size and shape of fracture. Comparing to the commonly used bounding box (i.e., axis-align bounding box), rotated bounding box shows a greater adaptability to fit with the elongated shape of fracture, such that minimizing the ratio of background within the bounding box. Besides, an additional benefit of rotated bounding box is that it can provide relative information on the orientation and length of fracture without the further segmentation and measurement step. To validate the applicability of the proposed approach, we train and test our approach with a number of CT image sets of fractured granite specimens with highly heterogeneous background and other rocks such as sandstone and shale. The result demonstrates that our approach can lead to the encouraging results on fracture detection with the mean average precision (mAP) up to 0.89 and also outperform the conventional approach in terms of background-to-object ratio within the bounding box.