Pavement Crack Detection Research Articles

Pavement crack detection based on depth-supervision FRRN model

Timely detection of early pavement distress is crucial for effective pavement maintenance. A promising approach involves the segmenting the road surface cracks area from its images. However, the previously employed full-resolution residual network (FRRN), when employing a large number of full-resolution residual units (FRRUs), is susceptible to challenges such as exploding and vanishing gradients. Addressing these issues, this paper has introduced a depth supervision mechanism into FRRN, leading to the development of the Depth Supervision FRRN (DSFRRN) model, designed specifically for accurate segmentation of cracks in road images. This model enhances nonlinear expressiveness while retaining essential features, achieving high precision in pavement crack segmentation. Through experimental validation using a dataset comprising 1565 images of damaged pavements, the result demonstrate that DSFRRN outperforms the original FRRN in terms of both F1 score and Jaccard index, accurately delineating cracks. Consequently, the automated pavement damage detection method presented herein facilitates cost-effective and efficient pavement inspection, contributing to the safeguarding of roadway surfaces and transportation infrastructure.

Pavement Distress Detection Based on the Staged Deep Learning Classifier Approach

Pavement crack detection is a critical task that is essential to ensure the safety of roads and highways. Accurate detection and classification of pavement cracks can help transportation agencies to identify potential maintenance needs and plan appropriate interventions. In this project, we propose a staged deep learning classifier approach for pavement crack detection to provide accurate and comprehensive information about the pavement condition. In this proposed pavement crack detection model, there are four main phases: pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection, and crack detection. Firstly, raw images are pre-processed through median filtering and histogram equalization for noise removal and contrast enhancement. Next, features such as the improved local binary pattern, gray-level co-occurrence matrix, and gray-level run length matrix are extracted from the pre-processed images. The optimal features are selected using a hybrid optimization model, the tuna customized honey badger optimization algorithm, which combines the honey badger algorithm and tuna swarm optimization. This new hybrid optimization model will enhance the search strategy for solving optimization problems. The loss function of an augmented convolutional neural network (A-CNN) is modified to compute the root mean square error instead of the entropy-based loss function. The final detected outcomes (presence or absence of cracks) are acquired from the A-CNN.

Multi-Scale Semantic Map Distillation for Lightweight Pavement Crack Detection

Multi-Scale Semantic Map Distillation for Lightweight Pavement Crack Detection

Pavement Crack Detection and Identification Based on Improved YOLOv8

Aiming at the problem of poor real-time performance and low precision of traditional pavement crack detection, an improved YOLOv8 algorithm is proposed to realize the automatic pavement crack detection and identification. Firstly, the crack image is manually labeled by LabelImg labeling software, and then the model parameters are obtained by improving YOLOv8 network. The improved method includes introducing a convolution block attention module (CBAM) to enhance the feature extraction ability, and optimizing the weighted intersection-to-union ratio (Wiou) loss function. Through comprehensive evaluation indexes (F1-measure and mAP@50-95%), the performance of the original model and the improved model in pavement crack detection and recognition is compared. The results show that the improved model has improved the detection precision, F1 value and mAP@50-95% value, which are 2.91%, 3.29% and 1.7% respectively. These results show that the improved model has significant practical significance in realizing the automatic identification of pavement cracks.

Research on Pavement Crack Detection Based on Random Structure Forest and Density Clustering

Research on Pavement Crack Detection Based on Random Structure Forest and Density Clustering

Self-adaptive 2D[sbnd]3D image fusion for automated pixel-level pavement crack detection

Current 2D and 3D image-based crack detection methods in transportation infrastructure often struggle with noise robustness and feature diversity. To overcome these challenges, the paper use CSF-CrackNet, a self-adaptive 2D3D image fusion model utilizes channel and spatial modules for automated pavement crack segmentation. CSF-CrackNet consists of four parts: feature enhanced and field sensing (FEFS) module, channel module, spatial module, and semantic segmentation module. A multi-feature image dataset was established using a vehicle-mounted 3D imaging system, including color images, depth images, and color-depth overlapped images. Results show that the mean intersection over union (mIOU) of most models under the CSF-CrackNet framework can be increased to above 80 %. Compared with original RGB and depth images, the average mIOU increases with image fusion by 10 % and 5 %, respectively. The ablation experiment and weight significance analysis further demonstrate that CSF-CrackNet can significantly improve semantic segmentation performance by balancing information between 2D and 3D images.

Investigation on lightweight identification method for pavement cracks

Mastering a lightweight method for the identification of pavement surface cracks plays a vital role in enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of pavement crack detection. However, the existing crack detection methods typically concentrate on improving model performance while neglecting the study of lightweight identification methods, causing inefficient crack detection. Therefore, this study aims to investigate a lightweight identification method for pavement cracks. High-definition vehicle-mounted cameras were employed to collect pavement crack images across multiple districts in Shenzhen, China, resulting in a dataset containing 20256 images. In addition, a pavement crack detection method based on the You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLO v8) model was proposed. On this basis, a knowledge distillation model enhanced by multiple teacher-assistants (KDMTA) was established to explore the impact of different teacher assistants and distillation paths on model performance. The results indicate that in the proposed KDMTA model, each level of teacher-assistant (TA) model can absorb diverse aspects of knowledge from the teacher models, thus broadening the range of insights. Subsequently, the information is imparted to lower-level TA models and the student model, expanding the perspective from which the student model acquires knowledge. Therefore, this improves the model's generalization performance and its effectiveness in target detection. The type and number of teacher assistant models, as well as the distillation path, influence the model performance. The random learning strategy enriches the combination and transfer of knowledge among teacher models, TA models, and student models, achieving lightweight identification for pavement crack. According to the results, the crack identification accuracy reaches 95.79 %, the mAP reaches 81.07 %, and the image processing speed has been improved by 79.6 %. This study enhances the efficiency and accuracy of pavement crack detection, providing methodological support for the rapid and accurate identification of pavement cracks. This study offers a novel method for the rapid and accurate identification of pavement cracks, which can assist management authorities to timely identify and repair pavement defects, reducing maintenance costs, and extending the lifespan of roads. Moreover, it can also facilitate the development of road safety management and intelligent transportation systems.

FCT-Net: A dual-encoding-path network fusing atrous spatial pyramid pooling and transformer for pavement crack detection

Cracks are a typical form of road damage, and accurate detection of cracks is of great significance for road maintenance work and ensuring traffic safety. Recently, computer vision has gradually been applied in the field of crack segmentation. However, there are still some extremely challenging problems in crack segmentation, such as complex backgrounds, information loss caused by pooling and convolution operations, and insufficient fusion of global and local semantic information. In response to the above problems, this paper proposes a dual-encoding-path network with U-Net architecture called FCT-Net, by fusing channel atrous spatial pyramid pooling (CASPP) and transformer. Specifically, CASPP obtains multi-scale receptive fields by incorporating spatial and channel attention, while refining and extracting local features. Meanwhile, we introduce long-short distance attention to construct a novel transformer with the prominent characteristic of interaction between local and global attention features. In addition, a residual convolution module is designed to enhance the local features of the transformer. Furthermore, we devise a multi-scale attention weight cross fusion module to aggregate the features of the dual encoding branch, for reducing information loss during downsampling and suppress background information. Eventually, we evaluate the performance of FCT-Net by experiments on three public datasets. Extensive experimental results show that FCT-Net achieves higher F1-score and mean intersection over union (mIoU) than state-of-the-art segmentation networks on the DeepCrack537 and CrackLS315 datasets. Meanwhile, it has excellent segmentation performance for cracks in complex scenes, with the highest recall, F1-score, and mIoU respectively as 85.64%, 81.67%, and 84.05% on the CrackTree260 dataset.

Enhancing autonomous pavement crack detection: Optimizing YOLOv5s algorithm with advanced deep learning techniques

To enhance the safety and comfort of vehicle travel, detecting pavement cracks is a critical task in road management. This article introduces an advanced single-stage target detection method utilizing the YOLOv5s algorithm to enhance real-time performance and accuracy. Initially, Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks are integrated into the model to facilitate self-learning for improved crack characterization. Subsequently, anchors computed through the K-means clustering algorithm are closely aligned with the fracture dataset, achieving an adaptation rate of 99.9 % and enhancing the recall rate of the model. Furthermore, the inclusion of the SimSPPF module from YOLOv6 diminishes memory usage and expedites detection speed. By replacing the original nearest up-sampling method with transposed convolution, optimization of up-sampling for crack datasets is achieved. Performance assessments reveal that the refined YOLOv5s algorithm attains an F1 score of 91 %, a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 93.6 %, and a 1.54 % increase in frames per second (fps) for pavement crack detection. This enhancement in detection technology signifies a substantial advancement in the maintenance and longevity of road infrastructure.

Pavement Crack Detection Using Fractal Dimension and Semi-Supervised Learning

Pavement cracks are crucial indicators for assessing the structural health of asphalt roads. Existing automated crack detection models depend on large quantities of precisely annotated crack sample data. The irregular morphology of cracks makes manual annotation time-consuming and costly, thereby posing challenges to the practical application of these models. This study proposes a pavement crack image detection method integrating fractal dimension analysis and semi-supervised learning. It identifies the self-similarity characteristics within the crack regions by analyzing pavement crack images and using fractal dimensions to preliminarily determine the candidate crack regions. The Crack Similarity Learning Network (CrackSL-Net) is then employed to learn the semantic similarity of crack image regions. Semi-supervised learning facilitates automatic crack detection by combining a small amount of labeled data with a large volume of unlabeled image data. Comparative experiments are conducted on two public pavement crack datasets against the HED, U-Net, and RCF models to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that, with a 50% annotation ratio, the proposed method achieves high-precision crack detection, with an intersection over union (IoU) exceeding 0.84, which is close to that of U-Net. Visual analysis of the detection results confirms the method’s effectiveness in identifying cracks in complex environments.

Terrestrial LiDAR derived 3D point cloud model, digital elevation model (DEM) and hillshade map for identification and evaluation of pavement distresses

The periodic assessment of pavement condition is one of the important requirements in ensuring not only the service life of the pavement but also for the safety of motorists as pavement distresses like potholes led to many fatal accidents in recent years in India. The traditional approach of manual evaluation is a cumbersome and time-consuming process which can be replaced by latest technologies like LiDAR. Literature on use of Terrestrial LiDAR for distress detection are very limited and even the reported studies have used mostly the raw point cloud data from LiDAR for detecting only selected distresses. However, there are many outputs which can be derived from Terrestrial LiDAR data like Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Hillshade, etc. which are not explored much. Hence in the present study, an attempt has been made to utilize all the possible outputs of Terrestrial LiDAR data, i.e., raw 3D model from point cloud data and LiDAR derived DEM and Hillshade to detect 15 pavement distresses in both bituminous and concrete pavement for a case study area of Vellore in Tamilnadu, India. Their suitability also was compared in order to find which output would be more suitable in identifying a particular distress on the road. The results revealed that Hillshade maps can detect all the pavement distresses except cracks when compared to 3D model and DEM. For the detection of pavement cracks, an image processing based solution using LiDAR data was tried out and was found to perform well in detecting the alligator cracks. The distress parameters such as length, width, depth, etc. were also calculated using LiDAR data and compared with the field observations. The error was found to be only few cms and thus indicate that the Terrestrial LiDAR can be employed to detect the pavement distresses accurately than the conventional manual methods.

Vision based nighttime pavement cracks pixel level detection by integrating infrared visible fusion and deep learning

Accurate detection of pavement cracks is an important task in road maintenance and safety management. However, accurate segmentation of road cracks at night is still challenging due to light conditions. In this study, an automatic segmentation method for nighttime road cracks based on infrared-visible fusion and deep learning is proposed. First, a fusion method of infrared and visible light images is proposed to improve the visibility of road cracks under low light conditions. Afterwards, a deep learning network integrating a dynamic sparse attention mechanism is proposed to segment the cracks in the enhanced road images. In this study, a dataset of infrared and visible light images of nighttime road cracks is acquired to test the effectiveness and sophistication of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can achieve accurate segmentation of nighttime pavement cracks (77.89 % mIoU、85.68 % mPA、97.74 % Accuracy、87.53 % Precision、81.55 % Recall、84.44 % F1-score) and better than the existing segmentation models (Unet, Pspnet, DeepLabv3+). Integration of the proposed method into an unmanned inspection robot helps to achieve 24/7 pixel-level pavement crack detection.

Pavement Crack Detection and Solution with Artificial Intelligence

Detecting and repairing pavement cracks is essential to ensure road safety and longevity. Traditional inspection and maintenance methods are time-consuming, expensive and often inaccurate. In recent years, there has been a growing trend to use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the process of pavement crack detection and repair. The article focuses on using AI techniques to detect pavement cracks and provide solutions to repair them. The proposed solution is based on using deep learning algorithms to analyze high-resolution images of the road surface. Photos are taken with a vehicle camera or a drone. The deep learning algorithm is trained using a large data set of tagged sidewalk crack images. Once trained, the algorithm can accurately detect and classify the type of cracks on the pavement surface, including longitudinal, transverse, block and crocodile cracks. The algorithm can also determine the severity of each crack and help prioritize repairs. When cracks are detected, the AI system can make recommendations for repair solutions. This includes identifying the appropriate caulk or filler material to use depending on the type and severity of the crack. The AI system can also recommend the most efficient and cost-effective repair method, such as B. Crack sealing, crack filling or deep repair. Overall, using AI to detect and repair cracks in sidewalks offers a more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective solution to keep roads safe and sustainable. By automating the inspection and repair process, this technology can help prevent accidents, reduce maintenance costs, and improve overall road safety.

Enhancing Road Crack Localization for Sustainable Road Safety Using HCTNet

Road crack detection is crucial for maintaining and inspecting civil infrastructure, as cracks can pose a potential risk for sustainable road safety. Traditional methods for pavement crack detection are labour-intensive and time-consuming. In recent years, computer vision approaches have shown encouraging results in automating crack localization. However, the classical convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach lacks global attention to the spatial features. To improve the crack localization in the road, we designed a vision transformer (ViT) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based encoder and decoder. In addition, a gated-attention module in the decoder is designed to focus on the upsampling process. Furthermore, we proposed a hybrid loss function using binary cross-entropy and Dice loss to evaluate the model’s effectiveness. Our method achieved a recall, F1-score, and IoU of 98.54%, 98.07%, and 98.72% and 98.27%, 98.69%, and 98.76% on the Crack500 and Crack datasets, respectively. Meanwhile, on the proposed dataset, these figures were 96.89%, 97.20%, and 97.36%.

A generative adversarial network approach for removing motion blur in the automatic detection of pavement cracks

AbstractAdvancements in infrastructure management have significantly benefited from automatic pavement crack detection systems, relying on image processing enhanced by high‐resolution imaging and machine learning. However, image and motion blur substantially challenge the accuracy of crack detection and analysis. Nevertheless, research on mitigating motion blur remains sparse. This study introduces an effective image processing system adept at deblurring and segmentation, employing a generative adversarial network (GAN) with UNet as the generator and Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN‐gp) as the loss function. This approach performs exceptionally in deblurring pavement crack images and improves segmentation accuracy. Models were trained with sharp and artificially blurred images, with WGAN‐gp surpassing other loss functions in effectiveness. This research innovatively suggests assessing deblurring quality through segmentation accuracy in addition to peak signal‐to‐noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), revealing that PSNR and SSIM may not fully capture deblurring effectiveness for pavement crack images. An extensive evaluation of various generators, including UNet, lightweight UNet, TransUNet, DeblurGAN, DeblurGAN‐v2, and MIMO‐UNet, identifies the superior performance of UNet on simulated motion blur. Validation with actual motion‐blurred images confirms the effectiveness of the proposed model. These findings demonstrate that GAN‐based models have great potential in overcoming motion blur challenges in pavement crack detection systems, marking a notable advancement in the field.

GGMNet: Pavement-Crack Detection Based on Global Context Awareness and Multi-Scale Fusion

Accurate and comprehensive detection of pavement cracks is important for maintaining road quality and ensuring traffic safety. However, the complexity of road surfaces and the diversity of cracks make it difficult for existing methods to accomplish this challenging task. This paper proposes a novel network named the global graph multiscale network (GGMNet) for automated pixel-level detection of pavement cracks. The GGMNet network has several innovations compared with the mainstream road crack detection network: (1) a global contextual Res-block (GC-Resblock) is proposed to guide the network to emphasize the identities of cracks while suppressing background noises; (2) a graph pyramid pooling module (GPPM) is designed to aggregate the multi-scale features and capture the long-range dependencies of cracks; (3) a multi-scale features fusion module (MFF) is established to efficiently represent and deeply fuse multi-scale features. We carried out extensive experiments on three pavement crack datasets. These were DeepCrack dataset, with complex background noises; the CrackTree260 dataset, with various crack structures; and the Aerial Track Detection dataset, with a drone’s perspective. The experimental results demonstrate that GGMNet has excellent performance, high accuracy, and strong robustness. In conclusion, this paper provides support for accurate and timely road maintenance and has important reference values and enlightening implications for further linear feature extraction research.

Pavement Crack Detection Based on the Improved Swin-Unet Model

Accurate pavement surface crack detection is crucial for analyzing pavement survey data and the development of maintenance strategies. On the basis of Swin-Unet, this study develops the improved Swin-Unet (iSwin-Unet) model with the developed skip attention module and the residual Swin Transformer block. Based on the channel attention mechanism, the pavement crack region can be better captured while the crack feature channels can be assigned more weights. Taking advantage of the developed residual Swin Transformer block, the encoder architecture can globally model the pavement crack feature. Meanwhile, the crack feature information can be efficiently exchanged. To verify the pavement crack detection performance of the proposed model, we compare the training performance and visualization results with the other three models, which are Swin-Unet, Swin Transformer, and Unet, respectively. Three public benchmarks (CFD, Crack500, and CrackSC) have been adopted for the purpose of training, validation, and testing. Based on the test results, it can be found that the developed iSwin-Unet achieves a significant increase in mF1 score, mPrecision, and mRecall compared to the existing models, thereby establishing its efficacy in pavement crack detection and underlining its significant advancements over current methodologies.

Review of Pavement Crack Types and Their Significance

This essay examines the significant importance of pavement distress detection, specifically in the capacity to identify and categorize various forms of cracks, in order to uphold road safety. This study explores the impact of technical breakthroughs on the detection and classification of pavement cracks, leading to notable improvements in road maintenance and accident prevention. The essay additionally explores a range of studies that indicate a connection between pavement conditions and traffic safety, including the association between pavement age and the likelihood of accidents, as well as the influence on the severity of crashes. This analysis serves to illustrate the paramount significance of maintaining pavement integrity in order to ensure traffic safety. The essay foresees future progress in crack detection techniques, highlighting their crucial role in the construction of safer road networks and the improvement of public safety.

Crack detection based on attention mechanism with YOLOv5

AbstractIn order to reduce the manual workload and reduce the maintenance cost, it is particularly important to realize automatic detection of cracks. Aiming at the problems of poor real‐time performance and low precision of traditional pavement crack detection, a crack detection method based on improved YOLOv5 one‐step target detection algorithm of convolutional neural network is proposed by using the advantages of depth learning network in target detection. The images were manually marked with LabelImg annotation software, and then the network model parameters were obtained through improving the YOLOv5 network training. Finally, the cracks are verified and detected by the established model. In addition, the precision and speed of crack detection using YOLOv3, YOLOv5s, and YOLOv5s‐attention models are compared by using Precision, Recall, and F1. After comparison, it is found that the detection precision of YOLOv5s‐attention is improved by 1.0%, F1 by 0.9%, and mAP@.5 by 1.8%.

Automated Pavement Condition Index Assessment with Deep Learning and Image Analysis: An End-to-End Approach.

The degradation of road pavements due to environmental factors is a pressing issue in infrastructure maintenance, necessitating precise identification of pavement distresses. The pavement condition index (PCI) serves as a critical metric for evaluating pavement conditions, essential for effective budget allocation and performance tracking. Traditional manual PCI assessment methods are limited by labor intensity, subjectivity, and susceptibility to human error. Addressing these challenges, this paper presents a novel, end-to-end automated method for PCI calculation, integrating deep learning and image processing technologies. The first stage employs a deep learning algorithm for accurate detection of pavement cracks, followed by the application of a segmentation-based skeleton algorithm in image processing to estimate crack width precisely. This integrated approach enhances the assessment process, providing a more comprehensive evaluation of pavement integrity. The validation results demonstrate a 95% accuracy in crack detection and 90% accuracy in crack width estimation. Leveraging these results, the automated PCI rating is achieved, aligned with standards, showcasing significant improvements in the efficiency and reliability of PCI evaluations. This method offers advancements in pavement maintenance strategies and potential applications in broader road infrastructure management.