Internal Detection of Ground-Penetrating Radar Images Using YOLOX-s with Modified Backbone

Abstract

Geological radar is an important method used for detecting internal defects in tunnels. Automatic interpretation techniques can effectively reduce the subjectivity of manual identification, improve recognition accuracy, and increase detection efficiency. This paper proposes an automatic recognition approach for geological radar images (GPR) based on YOLOX-s, aimed at accurately detecting defects and steel arches in any direction. The method utilizes the YOLOX-s neural network and improves the backbone with Swin Transformer to enhance the recognition capability for small targets in geological radar images. To address irregular voids commonly observed in radar images, the CBAM attention mechanism is incorporated to improve the accuracy of detection annotations. We construct a dataset using field detection data that includes targets of different sizes and orientations, representing “voids” and “steel arches”. Our model tackles the challenges of traditional GPR image interpretation and enhances the automatic recognition accuracy and efficiency of radar image detection. In comparative experiments, our improved model achieves a recognition accuracy of 92% for voids and 94% for steel arches, as evaluated on the constructed dataset. Compared to YOLOX-s, the average precision is improved by 6.51%. These results indicate the superiority of our model in geological radar image interpretation.