Crack Detection on Concrete Surfaces Using Deep Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Network: A Comparison Study Between U-Net and DeepLabV3+

Maintenance of infrastructures is a crucial activity to ensure safety using crack detection methods on concrete structures. However, most practice of crack detection is carried out manually, which is unsafe, highly subjective, and time-consuming. Therefore, a more accurate and efficient system needs to be implemented using artificial intelligence. Convolutional neural network (CNN), a subset of artificial intelligence, is used to detect cracks on concrete surfaces through semantic image segmentation. The purpose of this research is to compare the effectiveness of cutting-edge encoder-decoder architectures in detecting cracks on concrete surfaces using U-Net and DeepLabV3+ architectures with potential in biomedical, and sparse multiscale image segmentations, respectively. Neural networks were trained using cloud computing with a high-performance Graphics Processing Unit NVIDIA Tesla V100 and 27.4 GB of RAM. This study used internal and external data. Internal data consisted of simple cracks and were used as the training and validation data. Meanwhile, external data consisted of more complex cracks, which were used for further testing. Both architectures were compared based on four evaluation metrics in terms of accuracy, F1, precision, and recall. U-Net achieved segmentation accuracy = 96.57%, F1 = 87.55%, precision = 88.15%, and recall = 88.94%, while DeepLabV3+ achieved segmentation accuracy = 96.47%, F1 = 85.29%, precision = 92.07%, and recall = 81.84%. Experiment results (internal and external data) indicated that both architectures were accurate and effective in segmenting cracks. Additionally, U-Net and DeepLabV3+ exceeded the performance of previously tested architecture, namely FCN.