DMA-Net: DeepLab With Multi-Scale Attention for Pavement Crack Segmentation

Cracks are important indicators of pavement structural and operational conditions. Early pavement crack detection and treatments can help extend pavement service life, reduce fuel consumption, and improve safety and ride quality. Pavement distress surveys have traditionally been performed manually by visually inspecting the roads, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, computer-vision-based automated crack detection has great practical significance in pavement maintenance and traffic safety. Traditional image processing techniques are sensitive to noise in images and are thus likely to miss detecting some cracks due to the crack texture variety, complex lighting conditions, and various similar but irrelevant objects on the road. This paper adopts and enhances DeepLabv3+, a popular deep learning framework for semantic image segmentation, for road pavement crack detection. We propose a multi-scale attention module in the decoder of DeepLabv3+ to generate an attention mask and dynamically assign weights between high-level and low-level feature maps. Compared with fixed weights across different features, the dynamic weights strategy can assign more reasonable weights to different feature maps. Ablation experiments show that the attention mask can effectively help the model better combine multi-scale features and generate more accurate pavement crack segmentation results. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks, including Crack500, DeepCrack, and FMA (Fitchburg Municipal Airport) datasets. We further test it on pavement crack images captured by smartphones, and the results show that it provides a viable approach to road pavement crack segmentation in practice with excellent performance.