Style-Controlled Image Synthesis of Concrete Damages Based on Fusion of Convolutional Encoder and Attention-Enhanced Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

Developing deep learning network models for computer vision applications in concrete damage detection is a challenging task due to the shortage of training images. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel style-controlled image synthesis method for concrete damages based on the fusion of a convolutional encoder and an attention-enhanced conditional generative adversarial network. This makes it possible to generate effective images that can improve the damage detection performance of deep learning networks. To achieve this, a network architecture for concrete damage image synthesis, named DamageGAN-AE, was designed by fusing a convolutional encoder and an attention-enhanced conditional generative adversarial network. The DamageGAN-AE networks with different attention modules were trained, and the training results show that the well-trained DamageGAN-AE enhanced by coordinate attention is the best model for concrete damage image synthesis. The well-trained DamageGAN-AE was compared with the current competing methods to verify its performance. The DamageGAN-AE with image encoder was trained to implement the style-controlled image synthesis. Finally, the generated concrete damage images with diverse styles by the DamageGAN-AE model with image encoder were used to train deep learning networks. The results indicate that the generated style-controlled concrete damage images by the proposed method can effectively improve the concrete damage detection performance of deep learning networks.