Highway Crack Segmentation From Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images Using Deep Learning

Highway crack segmentation is a critical task for highway infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. While imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is applied to the task of highway crack segmentation, it has great prospects in terms of speed and range. However, it is difficult to accurately identify road cracks from UAV remote sensing images, because the cracks are very narrow and small, often containing only a few pixels. To improve the segmentation of road cracks in UAV images, this study proposed an improved identification technique based on the U-Net architecture enhanced with a convolutional block attention module, an improved encoder and the strategy of fusing long and short skip connections. A public road crack dataset was relabelled for network training and a UAV remote sensing road crack dataset containing 1157 images was used to verify the generalisation ability of the enhanced network model. Results showed that the proposed method could effectively predict highway cracks in UAV images, with mIoU of 77.47 % and crack accuracy of 68.38%, which was better than the traditional U-Net model and some traditional semantic segmentation models. The proposed network is trained quickly by public dataset and can predict the road cracks on the new UAV images with high crack accuracy. This study provides an effective solution for the need to quickly grasp the damage status of roads over a wide area in the case of earthquake and other natural disasters. The highway crack segmentation benchmark dataset will be open sourced after the manuscript is accepted at: https://github.com/zhhongsh/UAV-Benchmark-Dataset-for-Highway-Crack-Segmentation.