Crack Semantic Segmentation using the U-Net with Full Attention Strategy

Abstract: Structures suffer from the emergence of cracks, therefore, crack detection is always an issue with much concern in structural health monitoring. Along with the rapid progress of deep learning technology, image semantic segmentation, an active research field, offers another solution, which is more effective and intelligent, to crack detection Through numerous artificial neural networks have been developed to address the preceding issue, corresponding explorations are never stopped improving the quality of crack detection. This paper presents a novel artificial neural network architecture named Full Attention U-net for image semantic segmentation. The proposed architecture leverages the U-net as the backbone and adopts the Full Attention Strategy, which is a synthesis of the attention mechanism and the outputs from each encoding layer in skip connection. Subject to the hardware in training, the experiments are composed of verification and validation. In verification, 4 networks including U-net, Attention U-net, Advanced Attention U-net, and Full Attention U-net are tested through cell images for a competitive study. With respect to mean intersection-over-unions and clarity of edge identification, the Full Attention U-net performs best in verification, and is hence applied for crack semantic segmentation in validation to demonstrate its effectiveness.