Promising crack segmentation method based on gated skip connection

Abstract

This Letter proposes a promising deep learning-based method for crack segmentation based on gated skip connection. The proposed gated skip connection enables the decoder layers to promote crack-aware feature representations from the encoder layers by applying high weights on the crack-relevant features that come from the encoder layers and lower weights for irrelevant features. Unlike the related methods, the authors do not apply any pre-processing or refinement steps to improve the crack segmentation results. The proposed method beats the state-of-the-art methods with an open benchmark database (IoU of 87.5).