Deep learning-based masonry crack segmentation and real-life crack length measurement

While there have been a considerable number of studies on computer vision (CV)-based crack detection on concrete/asphalt public facilities, such as sewers and tunnels, masonry-related structures have received less attention. This research seeks to implement an automated crack segmentation and a real-life crack length measurement of masonry walls using CV techniques and deep learning. The main contributions include (1) a large dataset of manually labelled images about various types of Korea masonry walls; (2) a careful performance evaluation of various deep learning-based crack segmentation models, including U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and FPN; and (3) a novel algorithm to extract real-life crack length measurement by detecting the brick units. The experimental results showed that deep learning-based masonry crack segmentation performed significantly better than previous approaches and could provide a real-life crack measurement. Therefore, it has a huge potential for motivating masonry-based structure investigation.