MA-Xnet: Mobile-Attention X-Network for Crack Detection

Modern crack detection algorithms based on deep learning have unsolved issues, such as an abundance of parameters in the resulting models and lack of context information. Such issues may lower the efficiency of feature extraction and lead to unexpected task performance. Based on two semantic segmentation models, U-Net and the dual-attention network (DANet), an efficient mobile-attention X-network (MA-Xnet) is proposed for crack detection. For performance evaluation, segmentation experiments were performed on concrete crack images from an internationally recognized dataset, which were collected from various campus buildings of Middle East Technical University. The experimental results demonstrated that, compared with U-Net, the proposed method parameters were reduced by 82.33%, and improved by 11.32% and 12.37% in the key indices of the F1-Score and the mean intersection of union (mIoU), respectively, providing a reference for subsequent related lightweight crack-segmentation research.