MSCNet: A Framework With a Texture Enhancement Mechanism and Feature Aggregation for Crack Detection

Abstract

Bridge crack is one of the critical optical and visual information to judge the health state of bridges. The bridge crack detection methods based on artificial intelligence are essential in this field, but the current approaches are not satisfactory in terms of speed and accuracy. This study proposes a novel multi-scale crack detection network, called MSCNet, comprising a texture enhancement mechanism and feature aggregation to enhance the visual saliency of the objects in the background for bridge crack detection. We use Res2Net as the backbone network to improve the depth information expression ability of the cracks itself. Because the edge property of bridge cracks is prominent, to make full use of this visual feature, we use a texture enhancement module based on group attention to capturing the detailed information of cracks in low-level features. To further mine the depth information of the network, we use a cascade fusion module to capture crack location information in high-level features. Finally, to fully utilize the characteristic information of the deep network, we fuse the low- and high-level features to obtain the final crack prediction. We evaluate the proposed method compared with other state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale crack dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which achieves a precision of 93.5%, recall of 94.2%, and inference speed of over 63 FPS.

Keywords

• Crack detection
• deep learning
• feature aggregation
• grouping attention mechanism
• texture enhancement