A cost effective solution for pavement crack inspection using cameras and deep neural networks

Automatic crack detection on pavement surfaces is an important research field in the scope of developing an intelligent transportation infrastructure system. In this paper, a cost effective solution for road crack inspection by mounting the commercial grade sport camera, GoPro, on the rear of the moving vehicle is introduced. Also, a novel method called ConnCrack combining conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network and connectivity maps is proposed for road crack detection. In this method, a 121-layer densely connected neural network with deconvolution layers for multi-level feature fusion is used as generator, and a 5-layer fully convolutional network is used as discriminator. To overcome the scattered output issue related to deconvolution layers, connectivity maps are introduced to represent the crack information within the proposed ConnCrack. The proposed method is tested on a publicly available dataset as well our collected data. The results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other existing methods in terms of precision, recall and F1 score. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.