Distress Classification of Road Structures via Adaptive Bayesian Network Model Selection

This paper presents an accurate distress classification method via adaptive Bayesian network model selection for maintenance inspection of road structures. The main contribution of this paper is adaptive selection of two Bayesian network models concerning classification performance. The proposed method trains a tag-based Bayesian network model based on inspection items and estimates its classification performance. Furthermore, for distresses that degrade the classification performance of the tag-based Bayesian network model, the proposed method trains another multifeature Bayesian network model based on inspection items and distress images. Consequently, the proposed method can adaptively select optimal Bayesian network models according to the estimated performance of the tag-based Bayesian network model. In actual maintenance inspection, distresses are generally classified either from inspection items alone or from both inspection items and visual information of distress images-i.e., distress classification has two patterns. Therefore the adaptive model selection approach is suitable for this classification scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several comparative methods and is suitable for actual maintenance inspection due to its low computation costs. (C) 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.