• Computers and Concrete
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• 제21권6호
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• pp.727-739
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• 2018

Crack is the most common typical feature of concrete deterioration, so routine monitoring and health assessment become essential for identifying failures and to set up an appropriate rehabilitation strategy in order to extend the service life of concrete structures. At present, image segmentation algorithms have been applied to crack analysis based on inspection images of concrete structures. The results of crack segmentation offering crack information, including length, width, and area is helpful to assist inspectors in surface inspection of concrete structures. This study proposed an algorithm of image segmentation enhancement, named morphological segmentation based on edge detection-II (MSED-II), to concrete crack segmentation. Several concrete pavement and building surfaces were imaged as the study materials. In addition, morphological operations followed by cross-curvature evaluation (CCE), an image segmentation technique of linear patterns, were also tested to evaluate their performance in concrete crack segmentation. The result indicates that MSED-II compared to CCE can lead to better quality of concrete crack segmentation. The least area, length, and width measurement errors of the concrete cracks are 5.68%, 0.23%, and 0.00%, respectively, that proves MSED-II effective for automatic measurement of concrete cracks.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.195-206
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• 2022

Crack detection is essential for inspection of existing structures and crack segmentation based on deep learning is a significant solution. However, datasets are usually one of the key issues. When building a new dataset for deep learning, laborious and time-consuming annotation of a large number of crack images is an obstacle. The aim of this study is to develop an approach that can automatically select a small portion of the most informative crack images from a large pool in order to annotate them, not to label all crack images. An active learning method with difficulty learning mechanism for crack segmentation tasks is proposed. Experiments are carried out on a crack image dataset of a steel box girder, which contains 500 images of 320×320 size for training, 100 for validation, and 190 for testing. In active learning experiments, the 500 images for training are acted as unlabeled image. The acquisition function in our method is compared with traditional acquisition functions, i.e., Query-By-Committee (QBC), Entropy, and Core-set. Further, comparisons are made on four common segmentation networks: U-Net, DeepLabV3, Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), and PSPNet. The results show that when training occurs with 200 (40%) of the most informative crack images that are selected by our method, the four segmentation networks can achieve 92%-95% of the obtained performance when training takes place with 500 (100%) crack images. The acquisition function in our method shows more accurate measurements of informativeness for unlabeled crack images compared to the four traditional acquisition functions at most active learning stages. Our method can select the most informative images for annotation from many unlabeled crack images automatically and accurately. Additionally, the dataset built after selecting 40% of all crack images can support crack segmentation networks that perform more than 92% when all the images are used.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.221-235
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• 2022

Manual inspection of steel box girders on long span bridges is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The quality of inspection relies on the subjective judgements of the inspectors. This study proposes an automated approach to detect and segment cracks in high-resolution images. An end-to-end cascaded framework is proposed to first detect the existence of cracks using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and then segment the crack using a modified U-Net encoder-decoder architecture. A Naïve Bayes data fusion scheme is proposed to reduce the false positives and false negatives effectively. To generate the binary crack mask, first, the original images are divided into 448 × 448 overlapping image patches where these image patches are classified as cracks versus non-cracks using a deep CNN. Next, a modified U-Net is trained from scratch using only the crack patches for segmentation. A customized loss function that consists of binary cross entropy loss and the Dice loss is introduced to enhance the segmentation performance. Additionally, a Naïve Bayes fusion strategy is employed to integrate the crack score maps from different overlapping crack patches and to decide whether a pixel is crack or not. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves an 81.71% mean intersection over union (mIoU) score across 5 different training/test splits, which is 7.29% higher than the baseline reference implemented with the original U-Net.

• 한국정보기술학회논문지
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• 제17권9호
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• pp.99-112
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• 2019

도로 포장면의 크랙(crack)은 도로포장 구조의 열화를 입증하는 중요한 신호와 증상이다. 카메라 영상기반 도로포장 크랙 탐지는 강도 비균질성, 위상 복잡성, 낮은 대조도 및 노이즈성의 텍스처 배경 때문에 어려운 문제이다. 본 논문은 흑백영상에 대하여 깊은 신경망(DNN)에 기반하여 픽셀수준의 도로 크랙 탐지 및 분할 문제에 대해 다룬다. 변형된 U-net 네트워크와 고수준 특징 네트워크를 포함하는 새로운 DNN 구조를 제안한다. 본 연구의 중요 기여는 융합 층을 통해 공급되는 이들 네트워크의 결합 방법이다. 우리가 아는 한, 본 연구는 보도블럭 크랙 분할 및 탐지 문제를 결합을 소개한 최초의 논문이다. 크랙 탐지 및 분할의 시스템 성능은 새로운 구조를 사용하여 급격히 향상되었다. 제안된 시스템을 2개의 공개 데이터셋­크랙 포레스트 데이터셋(CFD)와 AigleRN 데이터셋­에 대하여 구현하고 평가하였다. 본 논문의 시스템은 여덟 가지의 최신 알고리즘과 같은 데이터셋으로 실험을 하였을 때, 가장 뛰어난 결과를 보여주었다.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.207-220
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• 2022

Structural health monitoring (SHM) plays a vital role in the maintenance and operation of constructions. In recent years, autonomous inspection has received considerable attention because conventional monitoring methods are inefficient and expensive to some extent. To develop autonomous inspection, a potential approach of crack identification is needed to locate defects. Therefore, this study exploits two deep learning-based segmentation models, DeepLabv3+ and Mask R-CNN, for crack segmentation because these two segmentation models can outperform other similar models on public datasets. Additionally, impacts of label quality on model performance are explored to obtain an empirical guideline on the preparation of image datasets. The influence of image cropping and label refining are also investigated, and different strategies are applied to the dataset, resulting in six alternated datasets. By conducting experiments with these datasets, the highest mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), 75%, is achieved by Mask R-CNN. The rise in the percentage of annotations by image cropping improves model performance while the label refining has opposite effects on the two models. As the label refining results in fewer error annotations of cracks, this modification enhances the performance of DeepLabv3+. Instead, the performance of Mask R-CNN decreases because fragmented annotations may mistake an instance as multiple instances. To sum up, both DeepLabv3+ and Mask R-CNN are capable of crack identification, and an empirical guideline on the data preparation is presented to strengthen identification successfulness via image cropping and label refining.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제34권6호
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• pp.50-57
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• 2019

In this study, various types of deep learning models that have been proposed recently are classified according to data input / output types and analyzed to find the deep learning model suitable for constructing a crack detection model. First the deep learning models are classified into image classification model, object segmentation model, object detection model, and instance segmentation model. ResNet-101, DeepLab V2, Faster R-CNN, and Mask R-CNN were selected as representative deep learning model of each type. For the comparison, ResNet-101 was implemented for all the types of deep learning model as a backbone network which serves as a main feature extractor. The four types of deep learning models were trained with 500 crack images taken from real concrete structures and collected from the Internet. The four types of deep learning models showed high accuracy above 94% during the training. Comparative evaluation was conducted using 40 images taken from real concrete structures. The performance of each type of deep learning model was measured using precision and recall. In the experimental result, Mask R-CNN, an instance segmentation deep learning model showed the highest precision and recall on crack detection. Qualitative analysis also shows that Mask R-CNN could detect crack shapes most similarly to the real crack shapes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제31권4호
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• pp.383-392
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• 2023

Post-earthquake building condition assessment is crucial for subsequent rescue and remediation and can be automated by emerging computer vision and deep learning technologies. This study is based on an endeavour for the 2nd International Competition of Structural Health Monitoring (IC-SHM 2021). The task package includes five image segmentation objectives - defects (crack/spall/rebar exposure), structural component, and damage state. The structural component and damage state tasks are identified as the priority that can form actionable decisions. A multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to conduct the two major tasks simultaneously. The rest 3 sub-tasks (spall/crack/rebar exposure) were incorporated as auxiliary tasks. By synchronously learning defect information (spall/crack/rebar exposure), the multi-task CNN model outperforms the counterpart single-task models in recognizing structural components and estimating damage states. Particularly, the pixel-level damage state estimation witnesses a mIoU (mean intersection over union) improvement from 0.5855 to 0.6374. For the defect detection tasks, rebar exposure is omitted due to the extremely biased sample distribution. The segmentations of crack and spall are automated by single-task U-Net but with extra efforts to resample the provided data. The segmentation of small objects (spall and crack) benefits from the resampling method, with a substantial IoU increment of nearly 10%.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제30권1호
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• pp.17-34
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• 2022

For steel structures, fatigue cracks are critical damage induced by long-term cycle loading and distortion effects. Vision-based crack detection can be a solution to ensure structural integrity and performance by continuous monitoring and non-destructive assessment. A critical issue is to distinguish cracks from other features in captured images which possibly consist of complex backgrounds such as handwritings and marks, which were made to record crack patterns and lengths during periodic visual inspections. This study presents a parametric study on image-based crack identification for orthotropic steel bridge decks using captured images with complicated backgrounds. Firstly, a framework for vision-based crack segmentation using the atrous convolution-based Deeplapv3+ network (ACDN) is designed. Secondly, features on crack images are labeled to build three databanks by consideration of objects in the backgrounds. Thirdly, evaluation metrics computed from the trained ACDN models are utilized to evaluate the effects of obstacles on crack detection results. Finally, various training parameters, including image sizes, hyper-parameters, and the number of training images, are optimized for the ACDN model of crack detection. The result demonstrated that fatigue cracks could be identified by the trained ACDN models, and the accuracy of the crack-detection result was improved by optimizing the training parameters. It enables the applicability of the vision-based technique for early detecting tiny fatigue cracks in steel structures.

• 한국건설관리학회논문집
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• 제25권2호
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• pp.36-44
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• 2024

본 논문에서는 합성곱신경망과 ROI기법을 이용한 콘크리트 균열 분석에 관해 소개한다. 콘크리트 표면, 빔과 같은 구조물은 피로 응력, 주기 부하에 노출되며, 이는 일반적으로 구조물의 표면에서 미세한 수준에서 시작되는 균열을 야기한다. 구조물의 균열은 안정성을 저하시키고 구조물의 견고함을 감소시킨다. 조기 발견을 통해 손상 및 고장 가능성을 방지하기 위한 예방 조치를 취할 수 있다. 일반적으로 수동 검사 결과는 품질이 좋지 않고, 대규모 기반 시설의 경우 접근이 어려우며, 균열을 정확하게 감지하기 어렵다. 이러한 수동검사의 자동화는 기존 방식의 한계를 해결할 수 있기 때문에 컴퓨터 비전 기반의 연구들이 수행되었다. 하지만 다양한 유형의 균열이나, 열화상 카메라 등을 이용한 연구들은 부족한 상태이다. 따라서 본 연에서는 콘크리트 벽의 균열을 자동으로 감지하는 방법론을 개발하여 제시하며, 다음과 같은 연구 내용을 목표로 한다. 첫째, 균열 감지 이미지 기반 분석의 주요 장점인 이미지 처리 기술을 사용하여 기존의 수동 방법과 비교하여 정확도가 향상된 결과 및 정보를 제공한다. 둘째, 강화된 Sobel edge segmentation 기술 및 ROI 기법 기반의 알고리즘을 개발하여 비파괴 시험을 위한 자동 균열 감지 기술을 구현한다.

• 한국전자거래학회지
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• 제26권1호
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• pp.93-106
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• 2021

최근 도로균열 탐지에 대한 많은 연구에서 딥러닝 기반의 접근법을 활용하면서 과거 알고리즘 기반의 접근법을 활용한 연구들보다 높은 성능과 성과를 보이고 있다. 그러나 딥러닝 기반의 많은 연구가 여전히 균열의 유형을 분류하는 것에 집중되어 있다. 균열 유형의 분류는 현재 수작업에 의존하고 있는 균열탐지 프로세스를 획기적으로 개선해 줄 수 있다는 점에서 상당한 기대를 받고 있다. 그러나 실제 도로의 유지보수 작업에 있어서는 균열의 유형뿐만 아니라 균열의 심각도에 관한 판단이 필수적이지만, 아직까지 도로균열 탐지와 관련된 연구들이 균열의 심각도에 대한 자동화된 산출까지 진전되지 못하고 있다. 균열의 심각도를 산출하기 위해서는 균열의 유형과 이미지 속 균열의 부위가 함께 파악되어야 한다. 본 연구에서는 균열 유형과 균열 부위의 동시적 탐지를 효과적으로 자동화하기 위해 딥러닝 기반의 객체탐지 모델인 Mobilenet-SSD를 활용하는 방법을 다루고 있다. 균열탐지의 정확도를 개선하기 위해 U-Net을 활용해 입력 이미지를 자동 분할하고, 이를 객체탐지 기법과 결합하기 위한 여러 실험을 진행하여 그 결과를 정리하였다. 결과적으로 U-Net을 활용한 이미지 의 자동 마스킹을 통해 객체탐지의 성능을 mAP 값이 0.9315가 되도록 향상시킬 수 있었다. 본 연구의 결과를 참고하여 도로포장 관리시스템의 구현에 균열탐지 기능의 자동화가 더욱 진전될 수 있다고 기대된다.