Frontiers in Environmental Science (Feb 2023)

Intelligent identification of pavement cracks based on PSA-Net

  • Xuan Lin,
  • Jian Zhang,
  • Daifeng Wu,
  • Enhong Meng,
  • Maoyi Liu,
  • Meng Li,
  • Fuliu Gao

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1105467
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11

Abstract

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The identification of pavement cracks is critical for ensuring road safety. Currently, manual crack detection is quite time-consuming. To address this issue, automated pavement crack-detecting technology is required. However, automatic pavement crack recognition remains challenging, owing to the intensity heterogeneity of cracks and the complexity of the backdrop, e.g., low contrast of damages and backdrop may have shadows with comparable intensity. Motivated by breakthroughs in deep learning, we present a new network architecture combining the feature pyramid with the attention mechanism (PSA-Net). In a feature pyramid, the network integrates spatial information and underlying features for crack detection. During the training process, it improves the accuracy of automatic road crack recognition by nested sample weighting to equalize the loss caused by simple and complex samples. To verify the effectiveness of the suggested technique, we used a dataset of real road cracks to test it with different crack detection methods.

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