A shallow 2D-CNN network for crack detection in concrete structures

PurposeThis study aims to obtain methods to identify and find the place of damage, which is one of the topics that has always been discussed in structural engineering. The cost of repairing and rehabilitating massive bridges and buildings is very high, highlighting the need to monitor the structures continuously. One way to track the structure's health is to check the cracks in the concrete. Meanwhile, the current methods of concrete crack detection have complex and heavy calculations.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a new lightweight architecture based on deep learning for crack classification in concrete structures. The proposed architecture was identified and classified in less time and with higher accuracy than other traditional and valid architectures in crack detection. This paper used a standard dataset to detect two-class and multi-class cracks.FindingsResults show that two images were recognized with 99.53% accuracy based on the proposed method, and multi-class images were classified with 91% accuracy. The low execution time of the proposed architecture compared to other valid architectures in deep learning on the same hardware platform. The use of Adam's optimizer in this research had better performance than other optimizers.Originality/valueThis paper presents a framework based on a lightweight convolutional neural network for nondestructive monitoring of structural health to optimize the calculation costs and reduce execution time in processing.