Automatic Multiclass Instance Segmentation of Concrete Damage Using Deep Learning Model

Concrete is one of the primary and most commonly used materials for the construction of buildings, roads, bridges, and dams. But it may lose its strength with age, moisture content, or due to other factors. As a result, little damage (crack and spall) to these structures may lead to sudden collapse or breakage, which in turn can decimate many lives with economic losses. Hence, to ensure their strength with the proper load, accurate screening of concrete surface damage is necessary for maintenance engineers to understand and evaluate the severity of the damage. Few preceding vision-based studies have proposed object detection and semantic segmentation approaches to carry out damage detection; however, the developed models could not segment different objects of the same class. The semantic segmentation approach separates regions that contain only objects of the same class. Concrete surface damage, on the other hand, may contain multiple objects, such as the Horizontal Crack, Vertical Crack, Diagonal Crack, Branch Crack, and Spall, that need to be segmented separately so that specific measures can be taken. This study utilizes Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) to manage concrete damage images and employ it to detect and segment defects in civil infrastructure with multiple objects. As we understand, this is the first research involving a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) application for damage detection using instance segmentation. Our proposed model has been trained and tested on a dataset containing 800 images (480*480 pixels) of different types of crack and spall are collected from distinct structures of CSIR-CEERI, Pilani, campus. To test and validate the generosity, an additional 96 damage images are downloaded using Google. The pre-processed and annotated images are used to train and validate the Mask R-CNN Classifier. Our experimental results show that damage can be classified efficiently with 95.13% accuracy on a custom dataset and 96.87% on randomly picked images.