Development and application of a more refined process for extracting rock crack width information based on artificial intelligence

Abstract

The process of image collection of high-altitude rock cracks using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) suffers from insufficient resolution and motion blur, which prevents more accurate detection of micro-cracks. Therefore, in this study, a rock crack refinement detection process (RC-RDP) based on super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) technique and semantic segmentation (SS) network is developed to detect micro-cracks. Four SRR networks (RCAN, SRDenseNet, ESRGAN, BSRGAN) and six SS networks (PSPNet, SegNet, DeepLab V3+, UNet++, UNet++(CBAM), SegFormer) are trained and tested separately using rock crack datasets. SRR indicators (PSNR and SSIM) and SS indicators (Precision, Recall, F1-Score and IoU) are applied to evaluate the performance of SRR networks and SS networks, respectively. According to the evaluation indicators of each network performance, in this paper, the RCAN network (PSNR = 31.08 dB and SSIM = 88.56%) is applied in the SRR part, and the UNet++ (CBAM) network is used in the crack detection part (Precision = 0.874, Recall = 0.886, F1-Score = 0.879 and IoU = 0.785). In addition, a novel data acquisition process integrating skeletonization algorithm, feature nodes detection algorithm, normal vector estimation algorithm and width extraction algorithm is used to calculate the minimum width WMin, maximum width WMax and average width WA information of the crack traces. The results of this paper show that the application of RC-RDP based on deep learning can obtain better super resolution (SR) images and more accurate width information. The method in this study shows excellent performance in detecting rock cracks.