• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.3797-3822
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• 2020

The inspection of cracks on the surface of tunnel linings is a common method of evaluate the condition of the tunnel. In particular, determining the thickness and shape of a crack is important because it indicates the external forces applied to the tunnel and the current condition of the concrete structure. Recently, several automatic crack detection methods have been proposed to identify cracks using captured tunnel lining images. These methods apply an image-segmentation mechanism with well-annotated datasets. However, generating the ground truths requires many resources, and the small proportion of cracks in the images cause a class-imbalance problem. A weakly annotated dataset is generated to reduce resource consumption and avoid the class-imbalance problem. However, the use of the dataset results in a large number of false positives and requires post-processing for accurate crack detection. To overcome these issues, we propose a crack detection method using a ternary classifier. The proposed method significantly reduces the false positive rate, and the performance (as measured by the F1 score) is improved by 0.33 compared to previous methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.153-166
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• 2022

Identifying fine cracks in steel bridge facilities is a challenging task of structural health monitoring (SHM). This study proposed an end-to-end crack image segmentation framework based on a one-step Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for pixel-level object recognition with high accuracy. To particularly address the challenges arising from small object detection in complex background, efforts were made in loss function selection aiming at sample imbalance and module modification in order to improve the generalization ability on complicated images. Specifically, loss functions were compared among alternatives including the Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), Focal, Tversky and Dice loss, with the last three specialized for biased sample distribution. Structural modifications with dilated convolution, Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) were also performed to form a new backbone termed CrackDet. Models of various loss functions and feature extraction modules were trained on crack images and tested on full-scale images collected on steel box girders. The CNN model incorporated the classic U-Net as its backbone, and Dice loss as its loss function achieved the highest mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 0.7571 on full-scale pictures. In contrast, the best performance on cropped crack images was achieved by integrating CrackDet with Dice loss at a mIoU of 0.7670.

• 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

Despite recent breakthroughs in deep learning and computer vision fields, the pixel-wise identification of tiny objects in high-resolution images with complex disturbances remains challenging. This study proposes a modified U-net for tiny crack segmentation in real-world steel-box-girder bridges. The modified U-net adopts the common U-net framework and a novel Self-Attention-Self-Adaption (SASA) neuron as the fundamental computing element. The Self-Attention module applies softmax and gate operations to obtain the attention vector. It enables the neuron to focus on the most significant receptive fields when processing large-scale feature maps. The Self-Adaption module consists of a multiplayer perceptron subnet and achieves deeper feature extraction inside a single neuron. For data augmentation, a grid-based crack random elastic deformation (CRED) algorithm is designed to enrich the diversities and irregular shapes of distributed cracks. Grid-based uniform control nodes are first set on both input images and binary labels, random offsets are then employed on these control nodes, and bilinear interpolation is performed for the rest pixels. The proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm are simultaneously deployed to train the modified U-net. 200 raw images with a high resolution of 4928 × 3264 are collected, 160 for training and the rest 40 for the test. 512 × 512 patches are generated from the original images by a sliding window with an overlap of 256 as inputs. Results show that the average IoU between the recognized and ground-truth cracks reaches 0.409, which is 29.8% higher than the regular U-net. A five-fold cross-validation study is performed to verify that the proposed method is robust to different training and test images. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm. Promotions of the average IoU individually utilizing the SASA and CRED module add up to the final promotion of the full model, indicating that the SASA and CRED modules contribute to the different stages of model and data in the training process.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.9
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• pp.194-200
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a multi-scale crack detection method using scaling. It is based on morphology algorithm, crack features, and scaling. We use a morphology operator which extracts patterns of crack. It segments cracks and background using opening and closing operations. Morphology based segmentation is better than existing integration methods using subtraction in detecting a crack it has small width. However, morphology methods using only one structure element could detect only fixed width crack. Thus, we use a scaling method. We use bilinear interpolation for scaling. Our method calculates values of properties such as the number of pixels and the maximum length of the segmented region. We decide whether the segmented region belongs to cracks according to those data. Experimental results show that our proposed multi-scale crack detection method has better results than those of existing detection methods.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.18-25
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• 2021

In many developed countries, such as South Korea, efficiently maintaining the aging infrastructures is an important issue. Currently, inspectors visually inspect the infrastructure for maintenance needs, but this method is inefficient due to its high costs, long logistic times, and hazards to the inspectors. Thus, in this paper, a novel crack inspection approach for concrete bridges is proposed using integrated image processing techniques. The proposed approach consists of four steps: (1) training a deep learning model to automatically detect cracks on concrete bridges, (2) acquiring in-situ images using a drone, (3) generating orthomosaic images based on 3D modeling, and (4) detecting cracks on the orthmosaic image using the trained deep learning model. Cascade Mask R-CNN, a state-of-the-art instance segmentation deep learning model, was trained with 3235 crack images that included 2415 hard negative images. We selected the Tancheon overpass, located in Seoul, South Korea, as a testbed for the proposed approach, and we captured images of pier 34-37 and slab 34-36 using a commercial drone. Agisoft Metashape was utilized as a 3D model generation program to generate an orthomosaic of the captured images. We applied the proposed approach to four orthomosaic images that displayed the front, back, left, and right sides of pier 37. Using pixel-level precision referencing visual inspection of the captured images, we evaluated the trained Cascade Mask R-CNN's crack detection performance. At the coping of the front side of pier 37, the model obtained its best precision: 94.34%. It achieved an average precision of 72.93% for the orthomosaics of the four sides of the pier. The test results show that this proposed approach for crack detection can be a suitable alternative to the conventional visual inspection method.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1975-1988
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• 2024

It is important to maintain cladding integrity in spent nuclear fuel management. This study proposes a numerical analysis method to evaluate the fracture resistance of irradiated zirconium alloy cladding under pinch load known to cause Mode-III failure. The mechanical behavior and fracture of the cladding under pinch loading can be evaluated by a Ring Compression Test (RCT). To simulate the fracture of hydride precipitates, zirconium matrix, and Zr/hydride interfaces under the stress field generated by RCT, a micro-structure crack propagation simulation method based on Continuum Damage Mechanics (CDM) has been proposed. Our RCT simulation model was constructed from microscopic images of irradiated cladding. In this study, we developed an automated process to generate a pixel-based finite element model by separating the hydride precipitates, zirconium matrix, and interfaces using an image segmentation method. The appropriate element size was selected to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of a crack propagation simulation. The load-displacement curves and strain energies from RCT were compared and analyzed with the simulation results of different element sizes. The finalized RCT simulation model can be used to establish the failure criterion of fuel rods under pinch loading. The advantages and limitations of the proposed method are fully discussed here.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.29-39
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• 2022

Crack detection plays an important role in the maintenance and protection of steel box girder of bridges. However, since the cracks only occupy an extremely small region of the high-resolution images captured from actual conditions, the existing methods cannot deal with this kind of image effectively. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a novel three-stage method based on deep learning technology and morphology operations. The training set and test set used in this paper are composed of 360 images (4928 × 3264 pixels) in steel girder box. The first stage of the proposed model converted high-resolution images into sub-images by using patch-based method and located the region of cracks by CBAM ResNet-50 model. The Recall reaches 0.95 on the test set. The second stage of our method uses the Attention U-Net model to get the accurate geometric edges of cracks based on results in the first stage. The IoU of the segmentation model implemented in this stage attains 0.48. In the third stage of the model, we remove the wrong-predicted isolated points in the predicted results through dilate operation and outlier elimination algorithm. The IoU of test set ascends to 0.70 after this stage. Ablation experiments are conducted to optimize the parameters and further promote the accuracy of the proposed method. The result shows that: (1) the best patch size of sub-images is 1024 × 1024. (2) the CBAM ResNet-50 and the Attention U-Net achieved the best results in the first and the second stage, respectively. (3) Pre-training the model of the first two stages can improve the IoU by 2.9%. In general, our method is of great significance for crack detection.