A Modified Fully Convolutional Network for Crack Damage Identification Compared with Conventional Methods

Large-scale structural health monitoring and damage detection of concealed underwater structures are always the urgent and state-of-art problems to be solved in the field of civil engineering. With the development of artificial intelligence especially the combination of deep learning and computer vision, greater advantages have been brought to the concrete crack detection based on convolutional neural network (CNN) over the traditional methods. However, these machine learning (ML) methods still have some defects, such as it being inaccurate or not strong, having poor generalization ability, or the accuracy still needs to be improved, and the running speed is slow. In this article, a modified fully convolutional network (FCN) with more robustness and more effectiveness is proposed, which makes it convenient and low cost for long-term structural monitoring and inspection compared with other methods. Meanwhile, to improve the accuracy of recognition and prediction, innovations were conducted in this study as follows. Moreover, differed from the common simple deconvolution, it also includes a subpixel convolution layer, which can greatly reduce the sampling time. Then, the proposed method was verified its practicability with the overall recognition accuracy reaching up to 97.92% and 12% efficiency improvement.