Deployment conscious automatic surface crack detection
Many developed countries are facing the challenge of a shrinking labor force and as a result, a decrease in the number of available experts. This has increased the need to automate labor intensive tasks in industry. Operation and maintenance tasks are no exception. Hitachi Systems, Ltd., started offering an inspection service utilizing drones and AI in 2018 to address this shortage in Japan [1,2]. We collaborated in the development of automatic crack detector technology which is a key feature of this service. In this blog, we’d like to outline the technology we developed.
The crack detection problem can be formulated as a semantic segmentation problem - for each pixel in an image, the model predicts whether it is a crack or not. An example of a prediction process is illustrated below:
