GoogleNet transfer learning with improved gorilla optimized kernel extreme learning machine for accurate detection of asphalt pavement cracks

Asphalt cracks are the initial indication and major pavement structural distress in the field of civil engineering because it might potentially intimidate road traffic and highway safety. Managing and maintaining pavement structures are the two crucial issues faced eventually by road administrators. It is essential to take immediate action regarding pavement structural damages to prevent its severity. In recent times, there established numerous deep learning-based image processing methods to detect pavement cracks, but due to the presence of interference factors such as noises and road markings in the images, those methods failed to provide high accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, with the aim to yield high accuracy of crack detection, this article designs a novel asphalt pavement crack identification system “GoogleNet transfer learning with improved gorilla optimized kernel extreme learning machine” (GNet TL with IGT-KELM). The road crack images used for perusal are acquired from NHA12D dataset, in which it consists of 40 asphalt pavement images with two different viewpoints. For the purpose of data balancing, some non-crack images are gathered by field survey. The images with large noise distortions and unwanted background information influence crack detection performance so that the preprocessing steps are executed before applying it to the prediction system. The most significant crack and non-crack features from the images are extracted using GNet TL model. With the extracted features, the KELM is well-trained to detect cracks and non-cracks separately. To increase crack detection performance of the classifier, an improved gorilla troop optimizer is introduced to optimize the KELM parameters. The experimental finding reveals that the proposed detection mechanism achieves crack recognition accuracy of about 98.93%, which is considerably greater than compared baseline approaches.