CIE Lab of Concrete
CIE Lab of Concrete
CIE Lab of Concrete
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Keywords: The traditional expert-on-site acceptance method has been unable to meet the need of intellectualization of
Concrete appearance analysis modern concrete industry. The cutting-edge achievements in the field of computer vision have immensely
Semantic segmentation accelerated the automation of concrete surface-related engineering. We propose an end-to-end concrete
FCN
appearance multiple identification method based on pixel-wise semantic segmentation and a corresponding
VGG
CIE Lab
method for quantitative chromatic aberration analysis based on CIE Lab. The objective function of the proposed
Fully Convolutional Network (FCN)-based network was optimized in terms of both empirical and structural risks,
and the complexity was reduced to improve its generalization performance. After comparing different preposed
base CNNs, the best results show 98.43 % pixel accuracy (PA), 91.33 % mean pixel accuracy (MPA), 83.89 %
mean intersection over union (MIoU), and 96.95 % frequency weighted intersection over union (FWIoU). In
addition, intra-class variation was explored under different light intensity and surface moisture content to
demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.
1. Introduction detection tasks, such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) [5,6], K-Nearest
Neighbor (KNN) [7,8], and Decision Tree (DT) [9,10]. These traditional
As it is strong, durable and relatively inexpensive, concrete is the ML approaches did obtain appreciable results within their own close-sets
most used material worldwide in civil and infrastructure engineering. under pre-configured experimental conditions, but such “shallow
However, the appearance defects such as cracks and pores may reduce models” usually perform unsatisfactorily in real circumstances due to
the material's resistance to water/chemical transport [1] and thus the the lack of non-linear activation and the imperfection of hand-crafted
durability of concrete structures [2]. On the other hand, the appearance features (error, repetition, subjectivity, etc.).
defects are the key parts of many visual condition assessment manuals To solve the problems above, Deep Neural Network (DNN), as an
[3]. In addition to the impact of defects on material and structural advanced branch in ML, has been employed in various visual-data-based
performance, the quality of concrete appearance is also important with tasks [11–18]. Among them, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) [19]
the improvement of the aesthetic requirements and material construc has become the representative network because the extraction of image
tion techniques. Traditional concrete appearance analysis is based on features by convolution operation has a high similarity with the se
visual inspection and manually sample measurement, which strongly mantic understanding process conducted within cortical neurons, logi
depend on the specialist's knowledge and experience and lack objec cally. In concrete appearance image analysis, CNN has been widely used
tivity in the quantitative analysis [4]. These bring about the needs of for crack [20–23] and damage [24–28] detection. Despite the excellent
developing a more objective and automated analysis method that re results of the above works, they are high-cost, with strict requirements
quires little or no direct human intervention. on the size of the input images, and unable to achieve end-to-end output.
In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) has become widely applied In 2015, Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) [29] was proposed. As
in concrete appearance analysis field for automated image processing. the pioneering work of semantic segmentation, FCN implemented a low-
Riding the wave of the development of computer vision, traditional ML cost, pixel-wise and end-to-end architecture for the first time, and its
algorithms have been utilized in their respective concrete surface object preposed base CNN is replaceable. Novel works have been carried out
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (Z. Hao).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cemconres.2022.106926
Received 7 March 2022; Received in revised form 14 July 2022; Accepted 25 July 2022
Available online 9 August 2022
0008-8846/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
for concrete crack and damage detection [30–37]. However, most of the inequality across categories in concrete appearance dataset are both
studies only focused on a single category of the target (usually cracks) non-negligible, which were not taken into consideration in the former
and ignored other concrete appearance targets such as pores, designed works as well.
seams, or holes, therefore may have poor resistance to target interfer Furthermore, the concrete appearance color has been paid even less
ence and cannot perform further analysis of the general surface (e.g. attention to. The little work available [40–43] also lacks automated
chromatic aberration) in practical applications. There exist several quantitative evaluation of chromatic aberration, not to mention the fact
studies [38,39] which considered the multiple categories of targets. that the analysis of chromatic aberration is significantly influenced by
However, it can be found that the effect of surface pores on crack various targets on the concrete surface.
identification is not negligible, but they were not treated as an inde In order to address the above issues, an end-to-end concrete
pendent category, not to mention their own relevance as a target that appearance analysis method based on pixel-wise semantic segmentation
can be quantified and analyzed for concrete appearance engineering. and CIE Lab is proposed. The content of this research is described as
Furthermore, the environmental conditions such as light intensity and follows. In Section 2, the dataset preparation, network architecture,
surface moisture content at the time of image collection were not model optimization, and chromatic aberration analysis method are
considered and analyzed, thus the robustness of the model is limited. On introduced. Then, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated
the other hand, the tiny inter-class variation and the great class- and the end-to-end analysis outputs are presented in Section 3. Finally,
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Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
Section 4 discusses the robustness of the proposed model and the pro 2.1. Dataset preparation
posed chromatic aberration analysis.
The images of concrete were taken from Xiong'an Station of Beijing-
2. Methodology Xiong'an Intercity Railway, Chaoyang Station of Beijing-Shenyang high-
speed Railway, Nanjing-Jurong Intercity Rail Transit, all in China, as
The proposed concrete appearance analysis method includes dataset well as concrete bulk samples prepared in the laboratory. The images
preparation, pixel-wise semantic segmentation model, and chromatic were captured by both an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) DJI Mavic 2
aberration analysis, as shown in Fig. 1. At first, image pre-processing Pro under auto mode, and an orbital large format scanner Senniao A0W.
includes geometric correction, cropping, and stitching of images was The camera view of the UAV was 77◦ and the distance between the UAV
carried out. Then, a dataset of concrete appearance images in different and the concrete surface was 1.5 m. The resolution of the scanner was
circumstances for the training, validation, and testing of automated from 300 dpi × 300 dpi to 900 dpi × 900 dpi. Different environmental
semantic segmentation was established. The pre-processed images were circumstances when captured the images were taken into consideration,
classified into pores, cracks, peculiarities, and general surfaces accord including different temperature (0–40 ◦ C), wind speed (0–8 m/s), wind
ing to the target types, and the dataset was prepared by manual coding direction (− 90 ~ +90◦ ), lighting conditions (1200–60,010 Lux), and
of labels. Afterward, a pixel-wise semantic segmentation model based on surface moisture content (0–100 %). In addition to the pores and cracks
a convolutional neural network was established. The training and on the surface of concrete, marks, stains, formwork seams, designed
optimization were conducted to perform pixel-wise recognition based seams, designed holes such as tie-bolt holes, pre-buried parts and pre-
on the dataset. At last, the chromatic aberration analysis was carried out drilled holes, and other surface objects were also captured in real
after removing the effect of the concrete surface targets. situations.
The data processing, network training, and evaluation were pro To eliminate the geometric distortion of images due to the equip
grammed in Python 3.7 based on PyCharm 2020 support. The deep- ment, acquisition methods, personnel operations, etc., Affine Trans
learning framework for pixel-wise semantic segmentation was formation, Projection Transformation and Polar Coordinate
PyTorch 1.7. The parallel computing framework for the network Transformation were carried out. Take a 5152 × 8560 JPG image ob
training was CUDA 10.2 and cuDNN 8.0. The specifications of the tained by the scanner as an example, the dataset preparation process is
workstation used for training and testing the network were as follows: shown in Fig. 2. The labeling was done by the authors on the basis of on-
NVIDIA Quadro M5000, Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10 GHz CPU. site marking of the objects and was checked by experts of the
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Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
engineering projects. The labeling accuracy was super pixel level, with m), single acquisition area, and images captured by scanner with
an actual accuracy of 0.5 ± 0.1 mm. Because the network established in different resolution and scanning speed; (2) images under different
this paper (Fig. 4) needs to down-sample for 5 times, the size of a unit environmental conditions such as temperature (0–40 ◦ C), wind speed
needs to be divisible by 25. Considering the computing power and the (0–8 m/s), wind direction (− 90 ~ +90◦ ), light intensity (1200–60,010
training effect, the size of the unit was set as 480 × 352. And the format Lux), and concrete surface moisture content (0–100 %); (3) images
was converted to PNG to avoid compression losses during transmission captured with different concrete strength (C40 ~ C60), surface shapes
and storage. and colors. The proposed model was built, modified and evaluated based
The information of the concrete appearance images in this paper can on this database. The training, validation, and test were set as a sample
be divided into three categories: general surfaces, defective objects, and ratio of 8:1:1.
peculiarities. Defective objects refer to material or structural defects
such as pores and cracks. Peculiarities refer to the designed seams and 2.2. Concrete appearance classification network (CACN)
holes, as well as other non-general concrete surfaces such as color cards
and scaleplate for measurement. Considering the demand of subsequent 2.2.1. Network architecture
evaluation metrics calculation and the difference of the features of the Fully Convolutional Network for Semantic Segmentation (FCN) [29]
targets, the targets to be identified and the corresponding labels are as is an advanced, real-time semantic segmentation method that has been
follows: red ([R, G, B] = [128, 0, 0]) for pores, yellow ([R, G, B] = [128, used since 2015. It can adapt classic classification networks such as
128, 0]) for cracks, green ([R, G, B] = [0, 128, 0]) for peculiarity, and AlexNet [45], VGG net [46], and GoogLeNet [47] into fully convolu
black ([R, G, B] = [0,0,0]) for general surface (background). Each pixel tional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning
in each unit was labeled using Labelme compiled by Python 3.7. Then to the segmentation task. In addition to using a stack of small con
the generated JSON label file was converted to PNG using the compiled volutional kernels to significantly reduce the network parameters and
json_to_dataset codes to obtain the labeled image as shown in the lower thus the training time required for the model as well as the storage ca
right corner of Fig. 2. The cut-acquired unit image and the corre pacity, and increasing the network depth, i.e., increasing the number of
sponding labeled image are a pair of data. nonlinear mappings of the network, allowing the network to extract
One-hot encoding was used to encode N states using N-bit state features with better judgment information and improving the network
registers, each state by its independent register bits, and only one valid performance, FCN defines a skip architecture that combines semantic
at any time [44]. For the four classifications ([pore, peculiarity, crack, information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from
general surface]) problem in this paper, if the true label of the current a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentation.
pixel is pore, the corresponding one-hot encoding is [1,0,0,0]. The Traditional CNNs are suitable for classification and regression tasks at
schematic of one-hot encoding is shown in Fig. 3. the image level and cannot perform classification tasks at the pixel level.
The dataset established includes 2463 sets of images captured by Furthermore, the form of output results of traditional CNNs are proba
UAV (1021 sets) and orbital scanner (1442 sets) and the corresponding bility vectors, which cannot be mapped directly from the input image to
labeled images prepared. The database contains: (1) images captured by the predicted image of the same size, i.e., end-to-end (image-to-image)
UAV with different image size, ISO (100–12,800), shutter time (1/ cannot be achieved. FCN solves these problems to a certain extent and
8000–1/2 s), aperture value (2.8–11), distance from the surface (0.5–4 significantly reduces the requirement of the input image size.
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Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
Table 1 100
Parameters of the proposed pixel-wise detection model. CACN-32s
CACN-16s
Parameters Values Notes
CACN-8s
Batch size 32 Batch training sample size 90
Optimizer Adam Gradient Descent Optimizer
Learning rate - VGG 10− 4 Initial learning rate (VGG)
Learning rate - AlexNet 10− 3 Initial learning rate (AlexNet)
Learning rate - GoogLeNet 5− 5 Initial learning rate (GoogLeNet) 80
Learning rate decay 0.75 learning rate×0.75/100 epochs
L2 coefficient 10− 3 L2-regularization coefficient
70
100
CA CN -V GG
CA CN -Goog LeNet
CA CN -A lex Net 60
80
50
PA MPA MIoU FWIoU
60
Fig. 6. Results under different skip-fusion structures.
40 detect objects in images in the training dataset, but does not generalize
well outside the training set, which means that there are more training
iterations than optimal. This problem due to the self-structure is com
mon and difficult to avoid in deep learning. L2-regularization was used
20
in response to the overfitting problem. 2-norm is determined by Eq. (10):
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
∑n
‖w‖2 = |wi |2 (10)
0 i=1
PA MPA MIoU FWIoU
where w denotes the original weight vector. L2-regularization can be
Fig. 5. Results of extended comparison of CACN model.
seen as the penalty term of the loss function, i.e. adding a regularizer to
∑ the loss function, which make the newly obtained optimized objective
CEH(p, q) = − Bi × yi log(softmax) function need to make a trade-off between the two, as shown in Eq. (11):
i
} ∑
N
∑ exp{w'i T z' optimized objective function = CEH n (p, q) + λ‖w‖2 2 (11)
=− Bi × yi log∑ { T ' } n=1
i exp w'j z (9)
j
} where N denotes the total number of pixels, λ denotes the L2 coefficient,
exp{w'i T z' which was set as 10− 3 by experiment.
= − Br × log∑ { T ' }
exp w'j z Thus the complex resolution that may result from only optimizing
j the loss function are no longer the optimal. Adding the regularizer can
make the resolution simpler, which conforms to Occam's Razor theory,
Apart from the solutions for the empirical risk mentioned above, the
structural risk was also taken into consideration. In deep learning, as a and is also more in line with the deviance and variance analysis (vari
ance indicates the complexity of the model). By reducing the complexity
typical structural risk, overfitting means that the method is able to
of the model, the degree of overfitting was reduced, thereby the
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100
Pore
100
Peculiarity
95
Crack
IoU (Intersection over Union)
80
90
CA (Class Accuracy)
85
60
80
40
Pore
75
Peculiarity
Crack
20
70
24 8 12 16 24 32 40 48 64 72 96 128 24 8 12 16 24 32 40 48 64 72 96 128
Fig. 7. Results of determining the optimal batch size: (a) IoU - Batch size, (b) CA - Batch size.
Fig. 8. An instance of pixel-wise semantic segmentation results with different batch sizes.
generalization ability of the model was improved. Random multi-scale Section 3.1) to determine the optimal model in iterations and to provide
training was applied by training the proposed method for different guidance on model optimization and tuning. Each batch was trained
resolutions to enhance the accuracy as well. with linearly increasing learning rates, beginning with the minimum
learning rate at 5 % of the maximum learning rate. The learning rate
2.2.3. Training procedure decay was 0.75 every 100 epochs. The model eventually went through
The learning rate and the batch size of training in the proposed >400 epochs to reach the optimum.
method were set by experiment at 10− 4 and 32, respectively. S-fold cross
validation was used during the training procedure. Evaluation and test
were carried out after each epoch to calculate IoU, PA, CA, etc. (in
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Fig. 9. Units of pixel-wise semantic segmentation results: (a) captured by UAV, (b) captured by scanner.
The chromatic aberration analysis was carried out with the effects of 3.1. Evaluation metrics of the classification model
the concrete surface targets removed and only the general surface
(background) retained. RGB color space cannot be directly converted to Pixel accuracy (PA), mean pixel accuracy (MPA), intersection over
CIE Lab color space [51], and it is necessary to convert RGB color space union (IoU), mean intersection over union (MIoU), frequency weighted
to XYZ color space and then XYZ color space to CIE Lab color space. The intersection over union (FWIoU), and class accuracy (CA) were applied
conversion between RGB and XYZ is shown in Eqs. (12) and (13). to evaluate the automated concrete appearance pixel-wise semantic
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ segmentation method. Among them, PA, MPA, MIoU and FWIoU are
X 0.4124 0.3576 0.1805 R
evaluation metrics for the whole sample set, while IoU and CA are
⎣ Y ⎦ = ⎣ 0.2126 0.7152 0.0722 ⎦⎣ G ⎦ (12)
evaluation metrics for a certain category. In the confusion matrix of this
Z 0.0193 0.1192 0.9505 B
task, the rows refer to the true category to which the pixel belongs, i.e.,
⎡
R
⎤ ⎡
3.2406 − 1.5372 − 0.4986
⎤⎡ ⎤
X the label value, and the columns refer to the predicted category for the
⎣ G ⎦ = ⎣ − 0.9689 1.8758 0.0415 ⎦⎣ Y ⎦ (13) pixel, i.e., the predicted value. In the following equations, Ni, j are
B 0.0557 − 0.2040 1.0570 Z defined as the number of pixels with true value of category i and pre
dicted value of category j. The number of categories k takes 4.
It can be seen that X = 0.4124R + 0.3576G + 0.1805B, the sum of the PA is the ratio of correctly predicted pixels to the total pixels, which
coefficients is 0.9505, which is very close to 1. The range of RGB is [0, is expressed in the confusion matrix as the ratio of the diagonal to the
255], so if the sum of the coefficients is equal to 1, then the range of X total number of pixels, as shown in Eq. (16):
must also be between [0, 255]. We can therefore consider modifying the ∑k
coefficients equivalently so that the sum is equal to 1, thus achieving a Nii
PA = ∑k i=1 ∑k (16)
mapping of XYZ and RGB in the same range. Then, the XYZ color space is i=1 j=1 Nij
mapped to the CIE Lab color space as follows:
⎧ MPA, also known as mean class accuracy, is the average of the per
⎨ L* = 116f (Y/Yn ) − 16 centage of pixels correctly predicted for each category, which is
*
a = 500[f (X/Xn ) − f (Y/Yn ) ] (14) expressed in the confusion matrix by summing the pixel precision of
⎩ *
b = 200[f (Y/Yn ) − f (Z/Zn ) ] each category in turn by row divided by the number of rows (total
number of categories), as shown in Eq. (17):
where
⎧ 1∑k Nii
⎪
( )3
6 MPA = ∑ (17)
⎪
⎪ t1/3
, t> k i=1 kj=1 Nij
⎪
⎨ 29
f (t) = ( )2 (15) IoU of a category is the ratio of the intersection of the true and
⎪
⎪ 1 29 4
⎪
⎪
⎩ t + , others predicted values of the category to the concatenation of the true and
3 6 29 predicted values, which is expressed in the confusion matrix as the ratio
A diagram of the conversion of the RGB color space to the CIE Lab of the diagonal value to (row sum + column sum - diagonal value (where
color space is shown in Fig. 5. that diagonal value is located)), as shown in Eq. (18). MIoU is the
average of all IoU, as shown in Eq. (19). FWIoU is an upgraded version of
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Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
100
Pore 100
Peculiarity
95 Crack
IoU (Intersection over Union)
CA (Class Accuracy)
90
90
85
80
80
Pore
Peculiarity
75 Crack
70 70
0 10000 20000 30000 4000 0 500 00 60 000 0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000
Light intensity / Lux Light intensity / Lux
(a) (b)
Fig. 11. Robustness of object detection with light intensity variance: (a) IoU- Light intensity, (b) CA-Light intensity.
100
Pore
Peculiarity 100
95
Crack
IoU (Intersection over Union)
90 95
CA (Class Accuracy)
85
90
80
85
75 Pore
Peculiarity
80 Crack
70
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Surface moisture content /% Surface moisture content /%
(a) (b)
Fig. 12. Robustness of object detection with variation of light intensity: (a) IoU-Surface moisture content, (b) CA-Surface moisture content.
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Fig. 13. Instances of images of the same surface with variation of surface moisture content: (a) captured by UAV, (b) captured by scanner.
Fig. 10. Whether it is for surface pores or cracks, design seams or studies, the environmental conditions at the time of image collection
formwork seams, or even peculiarities such as stains, the color cards, were taken into consideration. In particular, light intensity and surface
and the scaleplate on the concrete surface, the output results can be moisture content have non-negligible impacts on semantic segmenta
directly perceived. tion, thus affecting the quantitative analysis of cracks, pores, etc., and
Among the samples with unsatisfactory detection results, the main that of chromatic aberration, which is discussed in Section 4.
failures were concentrated on the peculiarities. This is because the pe
culiarity targets contain many different styles of pixels, which are 4. Discussion
difficult to be classified with very high accuracy and will be further
discussed in Section 4. Follow-up studies could consider further refine In addition to identifying inter-class variations, intra-class variations
ment of the types of peculiarity targets or use instance segmentation, are further discussed to analyze the robustness of the proposed model.
and also take inter-unit continuity into consideration. One of the key reasons for using a convolutional neural network in this
Based on the results of the semantic segmentation, the corresponding task is to reduce the impact of image quality fluctuation on analysis
surface pore area ratio, maximum surface pore diameter, maximum results due to differences in image capture conditions, such as equip
surface crack width, and length were automatically calculated. After ment, environmental conditions, individual differences in a manual
>150 instances of experimental verification, the relative deviations for process, etc. The dataset of this task contains the images captured by
the four parameters mentioned above between the results of the auto UAV under different parameters including image size, IOS, exposure
mated analysis and the manual measurements were not higher than 2.8 time, f number, distance from the surface and by scanner under different
%, 1.2 %, 5.1 %, and 2.1 %, respectively. As for the instance image given scanning resolution and speed, different environment circumstances
above, the whole automatic detection and analysis process took <3 s. including temperature, wind speed, wind direction, light intensity, angle
Frankly, this is highly efficient and accurate in the field of pixel-wise of light exposure and surface moisture content, as well as different
analysis of large-size images. strength, surface shapes and colors of the concrete. Due to the richness of
Unlike other multiple classification models, the approach proposed the dataset, the proposed model already has considerable robustness in
in this paper is not only to segment the cracks as accurately as possible, terms of the principle of deep learning.
but also to view and analyze various targets equally (as the modified The two most influential and non-negligible effects (light intensity
learning algorithm proposed in Section 2.2.2 aims to do). Among them, and surface moisture content) were identified experimentally. The
surface pore, as an independent category, can provide a quantitative robustness of the proposed model was verified in terms of these two as
analysis of the concrete surface, which is also an important interfering below. The validation samples were not in the training set and were no
term for crack segmentation. In addition, design seams, formwork <20 per subgroup.
seams, and peculiarities such as stains, color cards, and the scaleplate all
need to be identified to avoid their interference with chromatic aber
ration analysis of the general surface. Furthermore, unlike previous
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UCLCACN-L ab
0.0 UCLCACN-L ab
0.0
LCLCAAN-L ab
LCLCAAN-L ab
-0.5
-0.5
-1.0
-1.0
LCL RGB
-1.5
LCL RGB
0 10000 20000 30000 4 0000 50000 60000 0 10000 20000 30000 4 0000 50000 60000
Light intensity / Lux Light intensity / Lux
(a) (b)
Mean deviation of SDCA from manually measured reference
0.0
0.00
-0.2 LCLCACN-L ab
LCLCAAN-L ab
-0.25 -0.4
LCL RGB
LCL RGB
-0.6
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Surface moisture content /% Surface moisture content /%
(c) (d)
Fig. 14. Comparison of the robustness of the proposed chromatic aberration analysis method (CACN-Lab) and RGB mode under different light intensity and surface
moisture content: (a) SDCA - Light intensity; (b) SDD - Light intensity; (c) SDCA - Surface moisture content; (d) SDD - Surface moisture content.
4.1. Model robustness on light intensity surface increases. In a moist state, surface pores and cracks contain more
water due to their larger specific surface area. The wet air is subject to
The robustness metrics (IoU and CA) of the object detection of the gravity, so the drying process of concrete surface is a non-uniform
proposed model with light intensity variance are shown in Fig. 11. The process. The water contained in or around objects makes them darker,
relative deviations of IoU of pore, peculiarity, and crack are no >2.5 %, which adversely affects the detection. Among them, detection of pecu
0.7 %, and 1.2 %, respectively, and the relative deviations of CA are no liarity has the worst effect and the most fluctuation because it contains
>1.1 %, 3.2 %, and 2.4 %, respectively. The surface of concrete shows many different kinds. The detection results under air-dry state are
different states under different light intensities. At first, as the light in closest to the truth.
tensity increases, the difference between the objects to be detected and
the general concrete surface gradually increases. After reaching a certain
level, it no longer increases or even decreases. The light intensity during 4.3. Robustness of chromatic aberration analysis
image capture has a certain optimal interval for the effect of object
detection. In this case, it is 5000–20,000 Lux. To further analyze the robustness of the proposed chromatic aber
ration analysis, Quality Control Chart was used. With the number of
factor groups >10, the XBar-S control charts of SDCA and SDD of the
4.2. Model robustness on surface moisture content proposed method against directly using RGB without target identifica
tion to eliminate defective objects and peculiarities under different light
The robustness metrics (IoU and CA) of the object detection of the intensity and surface moisture content are shown in Fig. 14. The vertical
proposed model with surface moisture content variance are shown in coordinates are the average deviation of SDCA and SDD from the manual
Fig. 12. The relative deviations of IoU of pore, peculiarity, and crack are measurements for each subgroup. The blue dashed line is the specifi
no >4.8 %, 15.5 %, and 6.0 %, respectively, and the relative deviations cation limit (SLCACN) of the proposed method, and the green dashed line
of CA are no >3.5 %, 17.8 %, and 0.7 %, respectively. As the surface of is the upper and lower control limits (UCLCACN, LCLCACN). The red
concrete gradually dries (as shown in Fig. 13), the color of concrete dashed line is the specification limit of using RGB color mode without
becomes lighter, and the difference between objects and the general removing defective objects and peculiarities (SLRGB), under the same
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Z. Hao and X. Qi Cement and Concrete Research 161 (2022) 106926
calculation method as SDCA. And the black dashed line is its upper and Two evaluation metrics of chromatic aberration were proposed to
lower control limits (UCLRGB, LCLRGB). The specification limits and indicate the degree of chromatic aberration of the specimen itself and
control limits are shown as follows: the degree of variation from the chosen standard color card or the design
color. The chromatic aberration analysis was carried out with the effects
SL = X (18) of the concrete surface targets removed and only the general surface
(background) retained. The proposed CACN-CIE chromatic aberration
UCL = CL + 3σ (19) analysis method is more robust than the RGB mode under different light
intensity and surface moisture content.
LCL = CL − 3σ (20)
where σ is the standard deviation of the mean of each subgroup X, also Declaration of competing interest
known as the process standard deviation.
As can be seen from Fig. 14, whether in terms of the deviation of the The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
control limits from 0, the range of upper and lower control limits, or the interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
fluctuation of the data, it is clear that the proposed CACN-Lab method is the work reported in this paper.
more robust than the RGB mode under different light intensity and
surface moisture content. Data availability
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