Automatic Pavement Crack Detection Fusing Attention Mechanism

Pavement cracks can result in the degradation of pavement performance. Due to the lack of timely inspection and reparation for the pavement cracks, with the development of cracks, the safety and service life of the pavement can be decreased. To curb the development of pavement cracks, detecting these cracks accurately plays an important role. In this paper, an automatic pavement crack detection method is proposed. For achieving real-time inspection, the YOLOV5 was selected as the base model. Due to the small size of the pavement cracks, the accuracy of most of the pavement crack deep learning-based methods cannot reach a high degree. To further improve the accuracy of those kind of methods, attention modules were employed. Based on the self-building datasets collected in Linyi city, the performance among various crack detection models was evaluated. The results showed that adding attention modules can effectively enhance the ability of crack detection. The precision of YOLOV5-CoordAtt reaches 95.27%. It was higher than other conventional and deep learning methods. According to the pictures of the results, the proposed methods can detect accurately under various situations.