Effective distress detection and quantitative analysis play a crucial role in road maintenance and driving safety. The Pavement distress segmentation network (PDSNet) is designed to combine the pyramid scene parsing network (PSPNet) and U-Net, providing both prior global information and local features that can overcome the common detection issues on the pavement data set faced by a single network. This paper proposes an efficient and improved architecture of PDSNet called PDSNet II for enhanced global modeling and retrieving fine details capacities. The proposed PDSNet II represents two major modifications on the original PDSNet. Firstly, a shifted window based on fully connected conditional random fields (FC-CRFs) layer is purposefully introduced to provide connections among consecutive self-attention layers that significantly enhance modeling power. Secondly, PDSNet II adopts multiple-head attention mechanisms to capture diverse interaction information across multiple projection spaces. Consequently, the output maps from the pyramid pooling module (PPM) head and the U-Net tail are fed into a neural window FC-CRFs layer. PDSNet II was trained using a data set consisting of 12,648 two-dimensional (2D) intensity and three-dimensional (3D) range images depicting various pavement conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that PDSNet II outperforms the original PDSNet in terms of F1-score and intersection over union (IoU). Compared with state-of-the-art networks, PDSNet II exhibits superior performance in detecting complex distress patterns, while effectively reducing noise and maintaining robustness. Overall, the proposed PDSNet II framework shows promising results in pavement distress segmentation, highlighting its potential for practical applications.

Roads are the foundation of intelligent transportation systems, yet cracks are widely present in roads and seriously affect system performance. Cracks not repaired promptly can develop into severe road defects, significantly increasing the risk of traffic accidents. Researchers in the community have started to focus on the automatic sensing of cracks in asphalt pavements, while it is still a challenging task on concrete pavements. Cracks in the concrete pavement are easily recognized as interrupted segments rather than a continuous whole due to the interference of the surface texture. This mistake can seriously mislead the judgment of cracks and subsequent road repair. In this paper, we aim to solve the challenge by enhancing contextual information about cracks within the images. We first extract the information from the local and global representations using image information and then fuse it into complete contextual information by a designed multilayer perceptron. Finally, we use the discriminative loss to constrain the edges of cracks and backgrounds using complete crack contextual information. We have collected and annotated several images of concrete pavements from several significant provinces in China. Experiments show that our method achieves the best performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, especially in edge determination.

Introduction: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential in diagnosing cervical spondylosis, providing detailed visualization of osseous and soft tissue structures in the cervical spine. However, manual measurements hinder the assessment of cervical spine sagittal balance, leading to time-consuming and error-prone processes. This study presents the Pyramid DBSCAN Simple Linear Iterative Cluster (PDB-SLIC), an automated segmentation algorithm for vertebral bodies in T2-weighted MR images, aiming to streamline sagittal balance assessment for spinal surgeons.Method: PDB-SLIC combines the SLIC superpixel segmentation algorithm with DBSCAN clustering and underwent rigorous testing using an extensive dataset of T2-weighted mid-sagittal MR images from 4,258 patients across ten hospitals in China. The efficacy of PDB-SLIC was compared against other algorithms and networks in terms of superpixel segmentation quality and vertebral body segmentation accuracy. Validation included a comparative analysis of manual and automated measurements of cervical sagittal parameters and scrutiny of PDB-SLIC’s measurement stability across diverse hospital settings and MR scanning machines.Result: PDB-SLIC outperforms other algorithms in vertebral body segmentation quality, with high accuracy, recall, and Jaccard index. Minimal error deviation was observed compared to manual measurements, with correlation coefficients exceeding 95%. PDB-SLIC demonstrated commendable performance in processing cervical spine T2-weighted MR images from various hospital settings, MRI machines, and patient demographics.Discussion: The PDB-SLIC algorithm emerges as an accurate, objective, and efficient tool for evaluating cervical spine sagittal balance, providing valuable assistance to spinal surgeons in preoperative assessment, surgical strategy formulation, and prognostic inference. Additionally, it facilitates comprehensive measurement of sagittal balance parameters across diverse patient cohorts, contributing to the establishment of normative standards for cervical spine MR imaging.

Recent research in computational imaging largely focuses on developing machine learning (ML) techniques for image recognition in the medical field, which requires large-scale and high-quality training datasets consisting of raw images and annotated images. However, suitable experimental datasets for cervical spine X-ray are scarce. We fill the gap by providing an open-access Cervical Spine X-ray Atlas (CSXA), which includes 4963 raw PNG images and 4963 annotated images with JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation). Every image in the CSXA is enriched with gender, age, pixel equivalent, asymptomatic and symptomatic classifications, cervical curvature categorization and 118 quantitative parameters. Subsequently, an efficient algorithm has developed to transform 23 keypoints in images into 77 quantitative parameters for cervical spine disease diagnosis and treatment. The algorithm’s development is intended to assist future researchers in repurposing annotated images for the advancement of machine learning techniques across various image recognition tasks. The CSXA and algorithm are open-access with the intention of aiding the research communities in experiment replication and advancing the field of medical imaging in cervical spine.

Road surface deterioration, such as cracks and potholes, poses a significant threat to both road safety and infrastructure longevity. Swift and accurate detection of these issues is crucial for timely maintenance and user security. However, current techniques often overlook the unique characteristics of pavement images, where the small distressed areas are vastly outnumbered by the background. In response, we propose an innovative road distress classification model that capitalizes on sparse perception. Our method introduces a sparse feature extraction module using dilated convolution, tailored to capture and combine sparse features of different scales from the image. To further enhance our model, we design a specialized loss function rooted in domain-specific knowledge about pavement distress. This loss function enforces sparsity during feature extraction, guiding the model to align precisely with the sparse distribution of target features. We validate the strength and effectiveness of our model through comprehensive evaluations of a diverse dataset of road images containing various distress types and conditions. Our approach exhibits significant potential in advancing traffic safety by enabling more efficient and accurate detection and classification of road distress.

Automated pavement crack detection is crucial to supporting fine pavement maintenance and ensuring safety for road facilities. Due to the complex pavement condition and crack features, it is still a critical challenge in intelligent pavement surveys. This paper proposed a novel pixel-level pavement crack segmentation network, PCSNet, to provide a solution to this challenge. The network has richer attention and hybrid pyramid structures, which implement full-process crack feature fusion and enhancement. The richer attention module consists of cascaded self-attention and attention gate modules. It captures the crack spatial dependence information and prunes the feature response. The hybrid pyramid structures consist of a multistage convolutional pyramid module and a pyramid pooling module. It integrates contextual information at multiple receptive field scales to enhance the potential crack feature representation. The proposed structure enriches the crack details and optimises the scene parsing on the global geometry of the cracks. A sizeable 3D pavement crack dataset is built for training and testing. The proposed network exhibited the best performance, achieving F1-score, mean intersection of union, and mean pixel accuracy of 81.21%, 77.13%, and 87.17%, respectively. The network can reconstruct the complete crack geometry, preserve the crack edges well, and optimises the detection of shallow and complex cracks. The method exhibits superior and robust performance, facilitating accurate pavement technical condition assessment and maintenance decisions.

Recently, many deep learning methods have achieved great results in the field of automated pavement distress detection, but most of them ignore other types of distresses beyond cracks. This paper proposes an efficient deep learning framework for automated asphalt pavement distress segmentation called pavement distress segmentation network (PDSNet). PDSNet can effectively segment multiple asphalt pavement distresses, including crack, pothole, raveling, patch, and sealed crack. It consists of two parallel feature extraction branches. One is the P branch to extract prior global information. The other is the U branch to obtain local information. By utilising the global and local features together, PDSNet can produce precise segmentation results under complicated circumstances. For deep learning purposes, a pavement distress dataset consisting of 4000 pavement images is collected and manually labelled at pixel level. Each image of the pavement dataset is a two-channel image, which is concatenated by a 2D pavement image and the correspondingly 3D pavement image. Particularly, it is the first pavement distress dataset that utilises two-channel pavement images. According to the experimental results, PDSNet yields a performance with a MIoU of 83.7%. Compared with the state-of-the-art networks, PDSNet achieves the best MIoU and has considerable parameter number and inference time.

为了准确、快速地识别路面多病害,采用一种基于多分支框架的深度学习方法,提取并融合路面图像的大、小尺度特征,将路面二维图像和三维图像作为网络输入,增强病害特征.采集裂缝、条状修补、块状修补、坑槽、松散等沥青路面病害图像共计10 562张,进行人工标注.结果表明:500次训练后该方法的平均交并比为0.83,准确率和召回率的调和平均数F值为0.90,优于U-net、PSPNet、DeepLabv3+等方法;在单一类别上,对条状修补、坑槽、松散、桥接缝等分割效果最优,对裂缝、块状修补的识别展现出较强的鲁棒性;所提方法的识别效果高于仅使用单一输入或者单一分支的方法.因此,双通道和多分支的设计方法可以显著提升网络对多类别路面病害的识别精度.

Crack is a common concrete pavement distress that will deteriorate into severe problems without timely repair, which means the automated detection of pavement crack is essential for pavement maintenance. However, automatic crack detection and segmentation remain challenging due to the complex pavement condition. Recent research on pavement crack detection based on deep learning has laid a good foundation for automated crack segmentation, but there can still be improvements. This paper proposes an automatic concrete pavement crack segmentation framework with enhanced graph network branch. First, the nodes of the graph and nodes’ attributions are generated based on the image dividing. The edges of the graph are determined based on Gaussian distribution. Then, the graph from the image is input into the graph branch. The graph feature map of the graph branch output is fused with the image feature map of the encoder and then enters the decoder to recover the image resolution to obtain the crack segmentation result. Finally, the method is tested on a self-built 3D concrete pavement crack dataset. The proposed method achieves the highest F1 and IoU (Intersection over Union) in the comparison experiments. And the graph branch addition improves 0.08 on F1 and 0.06 on IoU compared with U-Net.

To help doctors and patients evaluate lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration (IVDD) accurately and efficiently, we propose a segmentation network and a quantitation method for IVDD from T2MRI. A semantic segmentation network (BianqueNet) composed of three innovative modules achieves high-precision segmentation of IVDD-related regions. A quantitative method is used to calculate the signal intensity and geometric features of IVDD. Manual measurements have excellent agreement with automatic calculations, but the latter have better repeatability and efficiency. We investigate the relationship between IVDD parameters and demographic information (age, gender, position and IVDD grade) in a large population. Considering these parameters present strong correlation with IVDD grade, we establish a quantitative criterion for IVDD. This fully automated quantitation system for IVDD may provide more precise information for clinical practice, clinical trials, and mechanism investigation. It also would increase the number of patients that can be monitored.

Intelligent recognition of traffic road damage is essential for realizing smart vehicles and intelligent transportation systems. The classification of road material types before recognition is a challenge for traffic road damage recognition due to differences in features such as concrete and asphalt. In addition, the widely distributed roads make environmental factors a critical factor affecting the classification. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based road material classification method that introduces an attention mechanism to deal with the influence of different environments on road material recognition. We acquired tens of thousands of road surface images for training and testing and performed practical validation in real roads. The experiments show that our method has high accuracy and recall in road material classification.