Exploring the Detection Accuracy of Concrete Cracks Using Various CNN Models

Automatic crack detection with the least amount of workforce has become a crucial task in the inspection and evaluation of the performances of concrete structure in civil engineering. Recently, although many concrete crack detection models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been developed, the accuracy of the proposed models varies. Up-to-date, the issue regarding the convolutional neural network architecture with best performance for detecting concrete cracks is still debated in many previous studies. In this paper, we choose three established open-source CNN models (Model1, Model2, and Model3) which have been well-illustrated and verified in previous studies and test them for the purpose of crack detection of concrete structures. The chosen three models are trained using a concrete crack dataset containing 40,000 images those with 227 × 227-pixel in size. The performance of three different convolutional neural network (CNN) models was then evaluated. The comprehensive comparison result indicates that Model2 which used batch normalization is capable of the best performance amongst the three models as selected for concrete cracks detection, with recording the highest classification accuracy and low loss. In a conclusion, we recommend Model2 for a concrete crack detection task.