MixSegNet: a novel crack segmentation network combining CNN and Transformer

In the domain of road inspection and structural health monitoring, precise crack identification and segmentation are essential for structural safety and disaster prediction. Traditional image processing technologies encounter difficulties in detecting cracks due to their morphological diversity and complex background noise. This results in low detection accuracy and poor generalization. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces MixSegNet, a novel deep learning model that enhances crack recognition and segmentation by integrating multi-scale features and deep feature learning. MixSegNet integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer architectures to enhance the detection of small cracks through the extraction and fusion of fine-grained features. Comparative evaluations against mainstream models, including LRASPP, U-Net, Deeplabv3, Swin-UNet, AttuNet, and FCN, demonstrate that MixSegNet achieves superior performance on open-source datasets. Specifically, the model achieved a precision of 95.2%, a recall of 88.2%, an F1 score of 91.5%, and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 84.8%, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness and reliability for crack segmentation tasks.