A novel convolutional neural network for enhancing the continuity of pavement crack detection

Abstract Pavement cracks affect the structural stability and safety of roads, making accurate identification of crack for assessing the extent of damage and evaluating road health. However, traditional convolutional neural networks often struggle with issues such as missed detection and false detection when extracting cracks. This paper introduces a network called CPCDNet, designed to maintain continuous extraction of pavement cracks. The model incorporates a Crack align module (CAM) and a Weighted Edge Cross Entropy Loss Function (WECEL) to enhance the continuity of crack extraction in complex environments. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves mIoU scores of 77.71%, 80.36%, 91.19%, and 71.16% on the public datasets CFD, Crack500, Deepcrack537, and Gaps384, respectively. Compared to other networks, the proposed method improves the continuity and accuracy of crack extraction.