A Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network for Pixel-level Crack Detection using Video Extracted Images

Automatic crack detection on pavement surfaces is an important research field in the scope of developing an intelligent transportation infrastructure system. In this paper, a novel method on the basis of conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (cWGAN) is proposed for road crack detection. A 121-layer densely connected neural network with deconvolution layers for multi-level feature fusion is used as generator, and a 5-layer fully convolutional network is used as discriminator. To overcome the scattered output issue related deconvolution layers, connectivity maps are introduced to represent the crack information within the proposed cWGAN. The proposed method is tested on a dataset collected from a moving vehicle equipped with a commercial grade high speed camera. This dataset is challenging because the images containing cracks also include the disturbance of other objects. The results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other existing methods in terms of precision, recall and F1 score.