Pixel-Wise Crack Detection Using Deep Local Pattern Predictor for Robot Application

Robotic vision-based crack detection in concrete bridges is an essential task to preserve these assets and their safety. The conventional human visual inspection method is time consuming and cost inefficient. In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm to detect cracks in a pixel-wise manner from real concrete surface images. In practice, crack detection remains challenging in the following aspects: (1) detection performance is disturbed by noises and clutters of environment; and (2) the requirement of high pixel-wise accuracy is difficult to obtain. To address these limitations, three steps are considered in the proposed scheme. First, a local pattern predictor (LPP) is constructed using convolutional neural networks (CNN), which can extract discriminative features of images. Second, each pixel is efficiently classified into crack categories or non-crack categories by LPP, using as context a patch centered on the pixel. Lastly, the output of CNN-i.e., confidence map-is post-processed to obtain the crack areas. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on samples captured from several concrete bridges. The experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method.