Image-Based Comprehensive Maintenance and Inspection Method for Bridges Using Deep Learning

Bridge management and maintenance work is an important part for the assessment the health state of bridge. The conventional management and maintenance work mainly relied on experienced engineering staffs by visual inspection and filling in survey forms. However, the human-based visual inspection is a difficult and time-consuming task and its detection results significantly rely on subjective judgement of human inspectors. To address the drawbacks of human-based visual inspection method, this paper proposes an image-based comprehensive maintenance and inspection method for bridges using deep learning. To classify the types of bridges, a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier established by fine-turning the AlexNet is trained, validated and tested using 3832 images with three types of bridges (arch, suspension and cable-stayed bridge). For the recognition of bridge components (tower and deck of bridges), a Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) based on modified ZF-net is trained, validated and tested by utilizing 600 bridge images. To implement the strategy of a sliding window technique for the crack detection, another CNN from fine-turning the GoogLeNet is trained, validated and tested by employing a databank with cropping 1455 raw concrete images into 60000 intact and cracked images. The performance of the trained CNNs and Faster R-CNN is tested on some new images which are not used for training and validation processes. The test results substantiate the proposed method can indeed recognize the types and components and detect cracks for a bridges.