Impacts of label quality on performance of steel fatigue crack recognition using deep learning-based image segmentation
Journal
Smart Structures and Systems
Journal Volume
29
Journal Issue
1
Pages
207-220
Date Issued
2022
Author(s)
Abstract
Structural health monitoring (SHM) plays a vital role in the maintenance and operation of constructions. In recent years, autonomous inspection has received considerable attention because conventional monitoring methods are inefficient and expensive to some extent. To develop autonomous inspection, a potential approach of crack identification is needed to locate defects. Therefore, this study exploits two deep learning-based segmentation models, DeepLabv3+ and Mask R-CNN, for crack segmentation because these two segmentation models can outperform other similar models on public datasets. Additionally, impacts of label quality on model performance are explored to obtain an empirical guideline on the preparation of image datasets. The influence of image cropping and label refining are also investigated, and different strategies are applied to the dataset, resulting in six alternated datasets. By conducting experiments with these datasets, the highest mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), 75%, is achieved by Mask R-CNN. The rise in the percentage of annotations by image cropping improves model performance while the label refining has opposite effects on the two models. As the label refining results in fewer error annotations of cracks, this modification enhances the performance of DeepLabv3+. Instead, the performance of Mask R-CNN decreases because fragmented annotations may mistake an instance as multiple instances. To sum up, both DeepLabv3+ and Mask R-CNN are capable of crack identification, and an empirical guideline on the data preparation is presented to strengthen identification successfulness via image cropping and label refining. Copyright © 2022 Techno-Press, Ltd.
Subjects
crack recognition; deep learning; image segmentation; label quality
SDGs
Other Subjects
Cracks; Deep learning; Fatigue crack propagation; Fatigue of materials; Image enhancement; Image segmentation; Structural health monitoring; Crack identification; Crack recognition; Deep learning; Fatigue cracks; Image cropping; Images segmentations; Modeling performance; Performance; Segmentation models; Steel fatigue; Refining
Type
journal article