Pixel-level crack segmentation of tunnel lining segments based on an encoder–decoder network

Abstract

Regular detection and repair for lining cracks are necessary to guarantee the safety and stability of tunnels. The development of computer vision has greatly promoted structural health monitoring. This study proposes a novel encoder–decoder structure, CrackRecNet, for semantic segmentation of lining segment cracks by integrating improved VGG-19 into the U-Net architecture. An image acquisition equipment is designed based on a camera, 3-dimensional printing (3DP) bracket and two laser rangefinders. A tunnel concrete structure crack (TCSC) image data set, containing images collected from a double-shield tunnel boring machines (TBM) tunnel in China, was established. Through data preprocessing operations, such as brightness adjustment, pixel resolution adjustment, flipping, splitting and annotation, 2880 image samples with pixel resolution of 448 × 448 were prepared. The model was implemented by Pytorch in PyCharm processed with 4 NVIDIA TITAN V GPUs. In the experiments, the proposed CrackRecNet showed better prediction performance than U-Net, TernausNet, and ResU-Net. This paper also discusses GPU parallel acceleration effect and the crack maximum width quantification.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

tunnel lining segment / crack detection / semantic segmentation / convolutional neural network / encoder–decoder structure

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52179105 and 41941019) and Science and Technology Innovation Project of Quanmutang Engineering.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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