Application of deep learning in structural health management of concrete structures

Structural health management constitutes an essential factor in ensuring the durability of concrete structures. Cracks in concrete, reinforcement corrosion, alkali-silica reaction and efflorescence attacks are common concrete defects that can be identified visually. However, the detection and classification of these defects in concrete bridges and other high-rise concrete structures is a difficult and expensive process using manual approaches. In this research, a deep learning application is applied to detect and classify concrete defects. Concrete images from the public repository were used to create the explored database. The database was divided into training and validation subsets. The visual geometry group (Vgg19), neural search architecture (nasnetlarge) and residual inception block (vinceptionresnetv2) algorithms were used to analyse the images. The results of the overall performance show that the Vgg19 algorithm recorded higher accuracy in the detection and classification of concrete defects when compared to the nasnetlarge and inceptionresnetv2 algorithms. The efficiency of the proposed approach was evaluated using a new dataset containing images of concrete defects. The outcome of this research shows clearly that deep learning models could enhance the efficiency of concrete structural health monitoring in a multi-classification scenario.