A Lightweight and High-Accuracy Model for Pavement Crack Segmentation
Source abstract
Abstract
Pavement cracks significantly affect road safety and longevity, making accurate crack segmentation essential for effective maintenance. Although deep learning methods have demonstrated excellent performance in this task, their large network architectures limit their applicability on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a lightweight, fully convolutional neural network model, enhanced with spatial information. First, the backbone network structure is optimized to improve the efficiency of spatial information utilization. Second, by incorporating adaptive feature reassembly and wavelet transforms, the up-sampling and down-sampling processes are refined, enhancing the model capacity to capture spatial information. Lastly, a dynamic combined loss function is employed during training to further improve model attention on crack edge details. To validate the model performance, we trained and tested it on the Crack500 dataset and applied the trained model directly to the AsphaltCrack300 dataset. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieved an MIoU of 80.37% and an F1-score of 78.22% on the Crack500 dataset, representing increases of 3.08% and 5.62%, respectively, compared to EfficientNet. On the AsphaltCrack300 dataset, the model exhibited strong robustness, significantly outperforming other mainstream models. Additionally, its lightweight design provides clear advantages, making it well suited for realworld applications with limited computational resources.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring · Asphalt Pavement Performance Evaluation · Concrete Corrosion and Durability
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
School of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China
China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co., Ltd., Wuhan 430063, China
References (41)
Show source-provided references
1. Deep Learning-Based Crack Detection: A Survey10.1007/s42947-022-00172-z ↗
2. Xing, Y., Han, X., Pan, X., An, D., Liu, W., and Bai, Y. (2024). EMG-YOLO: Road Crack Detection Algorithm for Edge Computing Devices. Front. Neurorob., 18.10.3389/fnbot.2024.1423738 ↗
3. Automated Pavement Crack Detection Using Deep Feature Selection and Whale Optimization Algorithm
4. Qiang, S., Guoying, L., Jingqi, M., and Hongmei, Z. (2016, January 27–29). An Edge-Detection Method Based on Adaptive Canny Algorithm and Iterative Segmentation Threshold. Proceedings of the 2016 2nd IEEE International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering (ICCSSE), Singapore.10.1109/CCSSE.2016.7784354 ↗
5. Tsalera, E., Papadakis, A., Samarakou, M., and Voyiatzis, I. (2022). Feature Extraction with Handcrafted Methods and Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Emotion Recognition. Appl. Sci., 12.10.3390/app12178455 ↗
6. Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network for Pavement Crack Detection10.1109/TITS.2019.2910595 ↗
7. Di Benedetto, A., Fiani, M., and Gujski, L.M. (2023). U-Net-Based CNN Architecture for Road Crack Segmentation. Infrastructures, 8.10.3390/infrastructures8050090 ↗
8. Saberironaghi, A., and Ren, J. (2024). DepthCrackNet: A Deep Learning Model for Automatic Pavement Crack Detection. J. Imaging, 10.10.3390/jimaging10050100 ↗
9. Qi, Y., Wan, F., Lei, G., Liu, W., Xu, L., Ye, Z., and Zhou, W. (2023). GMDNet: An Irregular Pavement Crack Segmentation Method Based on Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention Aggregation. Electronics, 12.10.3390/electronics12153348 ↗
10. Tan, M., and Le, Q.V. (2019, January 10–15). EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, Long Beach, CA, USA.
11. Haar Wavelet Downsampling: A Simple but Effective Downsampling Module for Semantic Segmentation10.1016/j.patcog.2023.109819 ↗
12. Wang, J., Chen, K., Xu, R., Liu, Z., Loy, C.C., and Lin, D. (November, January 27). CARAFE: Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2019), Seoul, Republic of Korea.10.1109/ICCV.2019.00310 ↗
13. Peng, L., Chao, W., Shuangmiao, L., and Baocai, F. (2015, January 18–20). Research on Crack Detection Method of Airport Runway Based on Twice-Threshold Segmentation. Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Instrumentation and Measurement, Computer, Communication and Control (IMCCC), Qinhuangdao, China.10.1109/IMCCC.2015.364 ↗
14. Matsuoka, T., and Matsushima, K. (2016, January 22–25). Crack Detection Using Spectral Clustering Based on Crack Features. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Region 10 Conference (TENCON), Singapore.10.1109/TENCON.2016.7848502 ↗
15. Automatic Road Crack Detection Using Random Structured Forests10.1109/TITS.2016.2552248 ↗
16. Hybrid Pixel-Level Concrete Crack Segmentation and Quantification across Complex Backgrounds Using Deep Learning10.1016/j.autcon.2020.103291 ↗
17. DeepCrack: Learning Hierarchical Convolutional Features for Crack Detection10.1109/TIP.2018.2878966 ↗
18. U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
19. Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation10.1007/978-3-030-01234-2_49 ↗
20. Sun, K., Xiao, B., Liu, D., and Wang, J. (2019, January 15–20). Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Long Beach, CA, USA.10.1109/CVPR.2019.00584 ↗
21. Hong, Y., Pan, H., Sun, W., and Jia, Y. (2021). Deep Dual-Resolution Networks for Real-Time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes. arXiv.
22. Poudel, R.P.K., Liwicki, S., and Cipolla, R. (2019). Fast-SCNN: Fast Semantic Segmentation Network. arXiv.
23. Tang, S., Sun, T., Peng, J., Chen, G., Hao, Y., Lin, M., Xiao, Z., You, J., and Liu, Y. (2023). PP-MobileSeg: Explore the Fast and Accurate Semantic Segmentation Model on Mobile Devices. arXiv.
24. Howard, A., Sandler, M., Chen, B., Wang, W., Chen, L.-C., Tan, M., Chu, G., Vasudevan, V., Zhu, Y., and Pang, R. (November, January 27). Searching for MobileNetV3. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Seoul, Republic of Korea.10.1109/ICCV.2019.00140 ↗
25. A Deeply Supervised Convolutional Neural Network for Pavement Crack Detection with Multiscale Feature Fusion10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3062070 ↗
26. Fan, Y., Hu, Z., Li, Q., Sun, Y., Chen, J., and Zhou, Q. (2024). CrackNet: A Hybrid Model for Crack Segmentation with Dynamic Loss Function. Sensors, 24.10.3390/s24227134 ↗
27. Fine-Grained Crack Segmentation for High-Resolution Images via a Multiscale Cascaded Network10.1111/mice.13111 ↗
28. Chen, B., Fan, M., Li, K., Gao, Y., Wang, Y., Chen, Y., Yin, S., and Sun, J. (2024). The PFILSTM Model: A Crack Recognition Method Based on Pyramid Features and Memory Mechanisms. Front. Mater., 10.10.3389/fmats.2023.1347176 ↗
29. Highway Crack Segmentation from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images Using Deep Learning10.1109/LGRS.2021.3129607 ↗
30. Zhang, T., Qin, L., Zou, Q., Zhang, L., Wang, R., and Zhang, H. (2024). CrackScopeNet: A Lightweight Neural Network for Rapid Crack Detection on Resource-Constrained Drone Platforms. Drones, 8.10.20944/preprints202407.0705.v2 ↗
31. Al-maqtari, O., Peng, B., Al-Huda, Z., Al-Malahi, A., and Maqtary, N. (2024). Lightweight Yet Effective: A Modular Approach to Crack Segmentation. IEEE Trans. Intell. Veh., 1–12.10.1109/TIV.2024.3405495 ↗
32. Multi-Scale Semantic Map Distillation for Lightweight Pavement Crack Detection10.1109/TITS.2024.3405477 ↗
33. Weakly-Supervised Pavement Surface Crack Segmentation Based on Dual Separation and Domain Generalization10.1109/TITS.2024.3464528 ↗
34. Huang, Z., and Sui, Y. (2024, January 27–30). Contour-Weighted Loss for Class-Imbalanced Image Segmentation. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.10.1109/ICIP51287.2024.10647384 ↗
35. Boundary Loss for Highly Unbalanced Segmentation10.1016/j.media.2020.101851 ↗
36. MSK-UNET: A Modified U-Net Architecture Based on Selective Kernel with Multi-Scale Input for Pavement Crack Detection10.1142/S0218126623500068 ↗
37. Lo, S.-Y., Hang, H.-M., Chan, S.-W., and Lin, J.-J. (2019, January 15). Efficient Dense Modules of Asymmetric Convolution for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation. Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Asia, Beijing, China.10.1145/3338533.3366558 ↗
38. Han, W., Zhang, Z., Zhang, Y., Yu, J., Chiu, C.-C., Qin, J., Gulati, A., Pang, R., and Wu, Y. (2020). ContextNet: Improving Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition with Global Context. arXiv.10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2059 ↗
39. Li, G., Yun, I., Kim, J., and Kim, J. (2019). DABNet: Depth-Wise Asymmetric Bottleneck for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation. arXiv.
40. Wang, Y., Zhou, Q., and Wu, X. (2019). ESNet: An Efficient Symmetric Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation. Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, Proceedings of the Second Chinese Conference, PRCV 2019, Xi’an, China, 8–11 November 2019, Springer International Publishing.10.1007/978-3-030-31723-2_4 ↗
41. Convolutional Neural Network-Based Pavement Crack Segmentation Using Pyramid Attention Network10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3037667 ↗