Accurate Crack Detection Based on Distributed Deep Learning for IoT Environment

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 11;23(2):858. doi: 10.3390/s23020858.

Abstract

Defects or cracks in roads, building walls, floors, and product surfaces can degrade the completeness of the product and become an impediment to quality control. Machine learning can be a solution for detecting defects effectively without human experts; however, the low-power computing device cannot afford that. In this paper, we suggest a crack detection system accelerated by edge computing. Our system consists of two: Rsef and Rsef-Edge. Rsef is a real-time segmentation method based on effective feature extraction that can perform crack image segmentation by optimizing conventional deep learning models. Then, we construct the edge-based system, named Rsef-Edge, to significantly decrease the inference time of Rsef, even in low-power IoT devices. As a result, we show both a fast inference time and good accuracy even in a low-powered computing environment.

Keywords: Efficient-Net; U-Net; crack detection; edge computing.