Automatic Road Tunnel Crack Inspection Based on Crack Area Sensing and Multiscale Semantic Segmentation

The detection of crack defects on the walls of road tunnels is a crucial step in the process of ensuring travel safetyand performing routine tunnel maintenance. The automatic and accurate detection of cracks on the surface of roadtunnels is the key to improving the maintenance efficiency of road tunnels. Machine vision technology combinedwith a deep neural network model is an effective means to realize the localization and identification of crackdefects on the surface of road tunnels.We propose a complete set of automatic inspection methods for identifyingcracks on the walls of road tunnels as a solution to the problem of difficulty in identifying cracks during manualmaintenance. First, a set of equipment applied to the real-time acquisition of high-definition images of walls inroad tunnels is designed. Images of walls in road tunnels are acquired based on the designed equipment, whereimages containing crack defects are manually identified and selected. Subsequently, the training and validationsets used to construct the crack inspection model are obtained based on the acquired images, whereas the regionscontaining cracks and the pixels of the cracks are finely labeled. After that, a crack area sensing module is designedbased on the proposed you only look once version 7 model combined with coordinate attention mechanism (CAYOLOV7) network to locate the crack regions in the road tunnel surface images. Only subimages containingcracks are acquired and sent to the multiscale semantic segmentation module for extraction of the pixels to whichthe cracks belong based on the DeepLab V3+ network. The precision and recall of the crack region localizationon the surface of a road tunnel based on our proposed method are 82.4% and 93.8%, respectively. Moreover, themean intersection over union (MIoU) and pixel accuracy (PA) values for achieving pixel-level detection accuracyare 76.84% and 78.29%, respectively. The experimental results on the dataset show that our proposed two-stagedetection method outperforms other state-of-the-art models in crack region localization and detection. Based onour proposedmethod, the images captured on the surface of a road tunnel can complete crack detection at a speed often frames/second, and the detection accuracy can reach 0.25 mm, which meets the requirements for maintenanceof an actual project. The designed CA-YOLO V7 network enables precise localization of the area to which a crackbelongs in images acquired under different environmental and lighting conditions in road tunnels. The improvedDeepLab V3+ network based on lightweighting is able to extract crack morphology in a given region more quicklywhile maintaining segmentation accuracy. The established model combines defect localization and segmentationmodels for the first time, realizing pixel-level defect localization and extraction on the surface of road tunnelsin complex environments, and is capable of determining the actual size of cracks based on the physical coordinatesystemafter camera calibration. The trainedmodelhas highaccuracy andcanbe extendedandapplied to embeddedcomputing devices for the assessment and repair of damaged areas in different types of road tunnels.

Characteristics of the crack tip field in high-speed railway tunnel linings under train-induced aerodynamic shockwaves

High-speed railway tunnels in various countries have continuously reported accidents of vault falling concrete blocks.Once the concrete block falling occurs,serious consequences follow,and traffic safety may be endangered.The aerodynamic shockwave evolves from the initial compression wave may be an important inducement causing the tunnel lining cracks to grow and form falling concrete blocks.A joint calculation framework is established based on ANSYS Fluent,ABAQUS,and FRANC3D for calculating the crack tip field under the aerodynamic shockwave.The intensification effect of aerodynamic shockwaves in the crack is revealed,and the evolution characteristics of the crack tip field and the influence factors of stress intensity factor(SIF)are analyzed.Results show that(1)the aerodynamic shockwave intensifies after entering the crack,resulting in more significant pressure in the crack than the input pressure.The maximum pressure of the inclined and longitudinal cracks is higher than the corresponding values of the circumferential crack,respectively.(2)The maximum SIF of the circumferential,inclined,and longitudinal crack appears at 0.5,0.68,and 0.78 times the crack front length.The maximum SIF of the circumferential crack is higher than that of the inclined and longitudinal crack.The possibility of crack growth of the circumferential crack is the highest under aerodynamic shockwaves.(3)The influence of train speed on the SIF of the circumferential crack is more than 40%.When the train speed,crack depth,and crack length change,the change of pressure in the crack is the direct cause of the change of SIF.

Crack identification method of highway tunnel based on image processing

In this paper,the images of tunnel surface are obtained by tunnel lining rapid inspection system,and tunnel crack forest dataset(TCFD)is established.The disaster characteristics of tunnel cracks are analyzed and summarized.Solutions of tunnel crack segmentation(TCS)method are developed for the detection and recognition of cracks on tunnel lining.According to the image features of the tunnel lining and the optical principal of detection equipment,effective image pre-processing steps are carried out before crack extraction.The tunnel image of TCFD is divided into appropriate number of blocks to magnify the local features of tunnel cracks.Local threshold segmentation method is used to traverse the blocks successively,and the first target block with crack is obtained.The seed in the target block were obtained by adaptive localization method and mapped to the whole image.Region growing is performed through crack seed until complete tunnel crack is extracted.The results show that the precision,recall rate and F-measure of tunnel cracks under the TCS method can reach 92.58%,93.07%and 92.82%without strong interference.According to the binary images processed by TCS method,the projection images of different types of tunnel cracks and their respective laws are obtained.Furthermore,the TCS method is implemented and deployed as a GUI software application.