A novel directional lighting algorithm for concrete crack pixel-level segmentation

Hamish Dow; Marcus Perry; Jack McAlorum; Sanjeetha Pennada; Gordon Dobie

doi:10.1117/12.2657235

18 April 2023 A novel directional lighting algorithm for concrete crack pixel-level segmentation

Hamish Dow, Marcus Perry, Jack McAlorum, Sanjeetha Pennada, Gordon Dobie

Proceedings Volume 12486, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2023; 124861L (2023) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2657235
Event: SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation, 2023, Long Beach, California, United States

Abstract

External lighting is required for autonomous inspections of concrete structures in low-light environments; however, previous studies have only considered uniformly diffused lighting to illuminate images. This study proposes a novel algorithm that utilises angled and directional lighting to obtain pixel-level segmentation of concrete cracks. The method applies a concrete crack detection algorithm to separate images, each illuminated with lighting from a different direction. Using a bitwise OR operation, the findings from all images are combined; the resulting image highlights the extremities of any present cracks in all lighting directions. When tested on a dataset of cracks ranging in widths from 0.07 mm to 0.3 mm, the algorithm obtained recall, precision and F1 score results of 77%, 84% and 92%, respectively. The algorithm was able to correctly segment cracks that were deemed too thin for similar diffused lighting segmentation methods found in literature. The proposed directional lighting algorithm has the potential to improve concrete inspections in low-light environments.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Hamish Dow, Marcus Perry, Jack McAlorum, Sanjeetha Pennada, and Gordon Dobie "A novel directional lighting algorithm for concrete crack pixel-level segmentation", Proc. SPIE 12486, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2023, 124861L (18 April 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2657235

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