Convolutional neural networks perform impressively in complicated computer-vision image-segmentation tasks. Vision-based systems surpass humans in speed and accuracy in quality inspection tasks. Moreover, the maintenance of big infrastructures, such as roads, bridges, or buildings, is tedious and time-demanding work. In this research, we addressed pavement-quality evaluation by pixelwise defect segmentation using a U-Net deep autoencoder. Additionally, to the original neural network architecture, we utilized residual connections, atrous spatial pyramid pooling with parallel and “Waterfall” connections, and attention gates to perform better defect extraction. The proposed neural network configurations showed a segmentation performance improvement over U-Net with no significant computational overhead. Statistical and visual performance evaluation was taken into consideration for the model comparison. Experiments were conducted on CrackForest, Crack500, GAPs384, and mixed datasets.
To improve recognition results, decisions of multiple neural networks can be aggregated into a committee decision. In contrast to the ordinary approach of utilizing all neural networks available to make a committee decision, we propose creating adaptive committees, which are specific for each input data point. A prediction network is used to identify classification neural networks to be fused for making a committee decision about a given input data point. The jth output value of the prediction network expresses the expectation level that the jth classification neural network will make a correct decision about the class label of a given input data point. The proposed technique is tested in three aggregation schemes, namely majority vote, averaging, and aggregation by the median rule and compared with the ordinary neural networks fusion approach. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on two artificial and three real data sets.
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