Lightweight Tunnel Defect Detection Algorithm Based on Knowledge Distillation

Abstract

One of the greatest engineering feats in history is the construction of tunnels, and the management of tunnel safety depends heavily on the detection of tunnel defects. However, the real-time, portability, and accuracy issues with the present tunnel defect detection technique still exist. The study improves the traditional defect detection technology based on the knowledge distillation algorithm, the depth pooling residual structure is designed in the teacher network to enhance the ability to extract target features. Next, the MobileNetv3 lightweight network is built into the student network to reduce the number and volume of model parameters. The lightweight model is then trained in terms of both features and outputs using a multidimensional knowledge distillation approach. By processing the tunnel radar detection photos, the dataset is created. The experimental findings demonstrate that the multidimensional knowledge distillation approach greatly increases the detection efficiency: the number of parameters is decreased by 81.4%, from 16.03 MB to 2.98 MB, while the accuracy is improved by 2.5%, from 83.4% to 85.9%.