Concrete crack segmentation based on UAV-enabled edge computing

In recent years, the rapid development of UAV technology has greatly improved the efficiency of the detection of concrete bridge cracks. With the increase in the number of bridge inspection UAVs, the number of tasks handled by cloud services has increased linearly, resulting in increased computational pressure on cloud services. In order to reduce the computational load of cloud servers, we proposed a crack segmentation network based on UAV-enabled edge computing. However, due to the limitation of computational capability of edge computing and the strength inhomogeneity and background complexity of cracks, crack detection is still a challenging task. Thus, we proposed an effective concrete crack segmentation network based on UAV-enabled edge computing, the network used feature map fusion to fuse different levels of feature map information into lower-level features for crack detection. The atrous spatial pyramid pooling network was used to increase the low-resolution feature map receptive field information for cracks and to enhance the detection accuracy for cracks of different scales. In addition, loss functions for crack datasets were proposed to solve the problem of imbalance due to positive and negative samples in the concrete crack images. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methods are better than the state-of-the-art edge detection and semantic segmentation methods in terms of accuracy and generality. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.