Image Processing Techniques for Concrete Crack Detection: A Scientometrics Literature Review

Cracks in concrete surfaces are one of the most prominent causes of the degradation of concrete structures such as bridges, roads, buildings, etc. Hence, it is very crucial to detect cracks at an early stage to inspect the structural health of the concrete structure. To solve the drawbacks of manual inspection, Image Processing Techniques (IPTs), especially those based on Deep Learning (DL) methods, have been investigated for the past few years. Due to the groundbreaking development of this field, researchers have devoted their endeavors to detecting cracks using DL-based IPTs and as a result, the techniques have given answers to many challenging problems. However, to the best of our knowledge, a state-of-the-art systematic review paper is lacking in this field that would present a scientometric analysis as well as a critical survey of the existing works to document the research trends and summarize the prominent IPTs for detecting cracks in concrete structures. Therefore, this article comes forward to spur researchers with a systematic review of the relevant literature, which will present both scientometric and critical analysis of the papers published in this research area. The scientometric data that are brought out from the articles are analyzed and visualized by using VOSviewer and CiteSpace text mining tools in terms of some parameters. Furthermore, this article elucidates research from all over the world by highlighting and critically analyzing the incarnated essence of some of the most influential papers. Moreover, this research raises some common questions as well as extracts answers from the analyzed papers to highlight various features of the utilized methods.