Automated Bridge Crack Detection Based on Improving Encoder–Decoder Network and Strip Pooling

Abstract

The detection of bridge cracks is an important task in bridge maintenance. It can also reflect the health of the bridge. However, cracks are usually in the form of strips, which are different from the concrete surface. Most crack detection algorithms cannot adapt to this situation well. In this paper, the original image of bridge cracks is collected and the data set is obtained through image processing. A bridge crack detection method based on improving encoder-decoder and mixed pooling module is proposed in this article. The basic features of the crack images are extracted by an encoder with dilated convolution. In this way, the resolution of the feature image can be guaranteed, and large receptive field can be obtained. Then the feature picture through the mix pooling module, which helps to capture remote context information and establish a remote dependency. Finally, the decoder restores the picture to its original size and integrates the original features. In the comparison experiment with the same experimental conditions, we compared with the classic image segmentation methods such as PSPNet, U-Net, FCN, and DeepLabv3+. The results show that our method achieves 98.3%, 97.3%, 97.6%, and 84.5% in precision, recall, F1-score, and MIoU. The results show that our method does have certain advantages in the field of crack detection and segmentation.