Multi-visual modality micro drone-based structural damage detection

Abstract

Accurate detection and resilience of object detectors in structural damage detection are important in ensuring the continuous use of civil infrastructure. However, achieving robustness in object detectors remains a persistent challenge, impacting their ability to generalize effectively. This study proposes DetectorX, a robust framework for structural damage detection coupled with a micro drone. DetectorX addresses the challenges of object detector robustness by incorporating two innovative modules: a stem block and a spiral pooling technique. The stem block introduces a dynamic visual modality by leveraging the outputs of two Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models. The framework employs the proposed event-based reward reinforcement learning to constrain the actions of a parent and child DCNN model leading to a reward. This results in the induction of two dynamic visual modalities alongside the Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) data. This enhancement significantly augments DetectorX's perception and adaptability in diverse environmental situations. Further, a spiral pooling technique, an online image augmentation method, strengthens the framework by increasing feature representations by concatenating spiraled and average/max pooled features. In three extensive experiments: (1) comparative and (2) robustness, which use the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Hub ImageNet dataset, and (3) field-experiment, DetectorX performed satisfactorily across varying metrics, including precision (0.88), recall (0.84), average precision (0.91), mean average precision (0.76), and mean average recall (0.73), compared to the competing detectors including You Only Look Once X-medium (YOLOX-m) and others. The study's findings indicate that DetectorX can provide satisfactory results and demonstrate resilience in challenging environments.