Crack-SegNet: Surface Crack Detection in Complex Background Using Encoder-Decoder Architecture

Timely and accurate detection of the initiation and expansion of crack is of great significance for improving safe operation of civil infrastructures. Image-based visual surface inspection has been an indispensable way for long-time infrastructure monitoring. However, existing crack detection methods generally suffer from the interference of complex background, leading to obvious performance drops. To tackle this, an improved encoder-decoder architecture based on SegNet is proposed in this paper, namely crack-SegNet. The encoder network hierarchically learns visual features from the original image, and the decoder network gradually up-samples and maps the encoded features to the input size for the pixel-level classification. In order to enhance the feature capacity of cracks in complex background, a channel attention mechanism is integrated into the encoder, as well as a spatial attention module in the decoder to improve the feature representation of cracks. Meanwhile, a spatial pyramid pooling is also attached to the last convolutional layer of the encoder to capture crack with different scales. To better validate the proposed method, a challenging metal surface crack dataset with much more complex background is collected. Experimental results on the datasets show that the proposed crack-SegNet outperforms other state-of-the-art crack detection methods, especially in complex background.