Pavement crack detection network based on pyramid structure and attention mechanism

Automatic detection of pavement crack is an important task for conducting road maintenance. However, as an important part of the intelligent transportation system, automatic pavement crack detection is challenging due to the poor continuity of cracks, the different width of cracks, and the low contrast between cracks and the surrounding pavement. This study proposes a novel pavement crack detection method based on an end-to-end trainable deep convolution neural network. The authors build the network using the encoder–decoder architecture and adopt a pyramid module to exploit global context information for the complex topology structures of cracks. Moreover, they introduce a spatial-channel combinational attention module into the encoder–decoder network for refining crack features. Further, the dilated convolution is used to reduce the loss of crack details due to the pooling operation in the encoder network. In addition, they introduce a lovasz hinge loss function, which is suitable for small objects. They train the authors' network on the CRACK500 dataset and evaluate it on three pavement crack datasets. Among the methods they compare, their method can achieve the best experimental results.