Deep Learning-Based Semantic Segmentation Methods for Pavement Cracks

As road mileage continues to expand, the number of disasters caused by expanding pavement cracks is increasing. Two main methods, image processing and deep learning, are used to detect these cracks to improve the efficiency and quality of pavement crack segmentation. The classical segmentation network, UNet, has a poor ability to extract target edge information and small target segmentation, and is susceptible to the influence of distracting objects in the environment, thus failing to better segment the tiny cracks on the pavement. To resolve this problem, we propose a U-shaped network, ALP-UNet, which adds an attention module to each encoding layer. In the decoding phase, we incorporated the Laplacian pyramid to make the feature map contain more boundary information. We also propose adding a PAN auxiliary head to provide an additional loss for the backbone to improve the overall network segmentation effect. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the interference of other factors on the pavement and effectively improve the mIou and mPA values compared to the previous methods.