학술논문

Smartphone-based structural crack detection using pruned fully convolutional networks and edge computing
Document Type
Article
Author
Source
Smart Structures and Systems, An International Journal, 29(1), pp.141-151 Jan, 2022
Subject
토목공학
Language
English
ISSN
1738-1584
Abstract
In recent years, the industry and research communities have focused on developing autonomous crack inspection approaches, which mainly include image acquisition and crack detection. In these approaches, mobile devices such as cameras, drones or smartphones are utilized as sensing platforms to acquire structural images, and the deep learning (DL)-based methods are being developed as important crack detection approaches. However, the process of image acquisition and collection is timeconsuming, which delays the inspection. Also, the present mobile devices such as smartphones can be not only a sensing platform but also a computing platform that can be embedded with deep neural networks (DNNs) to conduct on-site crack detection. Due to the limited computing resources of mobile devices, the size of the DNNs should be reduced to improve the computational efficiency. In this study, an architecture called pruned crack recognition network (PCR-Net) was developed for the detection of structural cracks. A dataset containing 11000 images was established based on the raw images from bridge inspections. A pruning method was introduced to reduce the size of the base architecture for the optimization of the model size. Comparative studies were conducted with image processing techniques (IPTs) and other DNNs for the evaluation of the performance of the proposed PCR-Net. Furthermore, a modularly designed framework that integrated the PCR-Net was developed to realize a DL-based crack detection application for smartphones. Finally, on-site crack detection experiments were carried out to validate the performance of the developed system of smartphone-based detection of structural cracks.