Adaptive cropping shallow attention network for defect detection of bridge girder steel using unmanned aerial vehicle images

Bridges are an important part of railway infrastructure and need regular inspection and maintenance.Using unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)technology to inspect railway infrastructure is an active research issue.However,due to the large size of UAV images,flight distance,and height changes,the object scale changes dramatically.At the same time,the elements of interest in railway bridges,such as bolts and corrosion,are small and dense objects,and the sample data set is seriously unbalanced,posing great challenges to the accurate detection of defects.In this paper,an adaptive cropping shallow attention network(ACSANet)is proposed,which includes an adaptive cropping strategy for large UAV images and a shallow attention network for small object detection in limited samples.To enhance the accuracy and generalization of the model,the shallow attention network model integrates a coordinate attention(CA)mechanism module and an alpha intersection over union(α-IOU)loss function,and then carries out defect detection on the bolts,steel surfaces,and railings of railway bridges.The test results show that the ACSANet model outperforms the YOLOv5s model using adaptive cropping strategy in terms of the total mAP(an evaluation index)and missing bolt mAP by 5%and 30%,respectively.Also,compared with the YOLOv5s model that adopts the common cropping strategy,the total mAP and missing bolt mAP are improved by 10%and 60%,respectively.Compared with the YOLOv5s model without any cropping strategy,the total mAP and missing bolt mAP are improved by 40%and 67%,respectively.

Analysis of large-scale UAV images using a multi-scale hierarchical representation

Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)-based imaging systems have many superiorities compared with other platforms,such as high flexibility and low cost in collecting images,providing wide application prospects.However,the acquisition of the UAV-based image commonly results in very high resolution and very large-scale images,which poses great challenges for subsequent applications.Therefore,an efficient representation of large-scale UAV images is necessary for the extraction of the required information in a reasonable time.In this work,we proposed a multi-scale hierarchical representation,i.e.binary partition tree,for analyzing large-scale UAV images.More precisely,we first obtained an initial partition of images by an oversegmentation algorithm,i.e.the simple linear iterative clustering.Next,we merged the similar superpixels to build an object-based hierarchical structure by fully considering the spectral and spatial information of the superpixels and their topological relationships.Moreover,objects of interest and optimal segmentation were obtained using object-based analysis methods with the hierarchical structure.Experimental results on processing the post-seismic UAV images of the 2013 Ya’an earthquake and the mosaic of images in the South-west of Munich demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Super-resolution enhancement of UAV images based on fractional calculus and POCS

A super-resolution enhancement algorithm was proposed based on the combination of fractional calculus and Projection onto Convex Sets(POCS)for unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)images.The representative problems of UAV images including motion blur,fisheye effect distortion,overexposed,and so on can be improved by the proposed algorithm.The fractional calculus operator is used to enhance the high-resolution and low-resolution reference frames for POCS.The affine transformation parameters between low-resolution images and reference frame are calculated by Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)for matching.The point spread function of POCS is simulated by a fractional integral filter instead of Gaussian filter for more clarity of texture and detail.The objective indices and subjective effect are compared between the proposed and other methods.The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms other algorithms in most cases,especially in the structure and detail clarity of the reconstructed images.