Abstract

Concrete structures are damaged by aging and external environmental factors. This type of damage is to appear in the form of cracks, to proceed in the form of spalling. Such concrete damage can act as the main cause of reducing the original design bearing capacity of the structure, and negatively affect the stability of the structure. If such damage continues, it may lead to a safety accident in the future, thus proper repair and reinforcement are required. To this end, an accurate and objective condition inspection of the structure must be performed, and for this inspection, a sensor technology capable of detecting damage area is required. For this reason, we propose a deep learning-based image processing algorithm that can detect spalling. To develop this, 298 spalling images were obtained, of which 253 images were used for training, and the remaining 45 images were used for testing. In addition, an improved loss function and data augmentation technique were applied to improve the detection performance. As a result, the detection performance of concrete spalling showed a mean intersection over union of 80.19%. In conclusion, we developed an algorithm to detect concrete spalling through a deep learning-based image processing technique, with an improved loss function and data augmentation technique. This technology is expected to be utilized for accurate inspection and diagnosis of structures in the future.