Automatic Crack Detection and Measurement Based On Image Ana
Automatic Crack Detection and Measurement Based On Image Ana
Abstract— Crack detection and measurement in civil structures and, in addition, sometimes need special equipment to improve
has been a constant field of research. Conventionally, a technician the accuracy of the measurement, which may be time consum-
is responsible to detect and measure cracks in the field. In this ing and strenuous, consequently lowering their accuracy. Due
paper, a system based on machine vision concepts has been
developed with the goal to automate the crack measurement to these facts, their automated use is not technically viable.
process. Using this method with only a single camera installed in a In this paper, the goal is to create a method able to detect and
truck or even in a robot, a sequence of images is processed and the measure cracks using only images acquired by a camera. The
crack dimensions are estimated. The experimental results validate proposed approach combines techniques of statistical filtering
the application of the proposed method for real structures. (particle filters) to recognize cracks automatically in images
Index Terms— Automation, image analysis, machine vision, and techniques of machine vision to measure the crack width
maintenance, particle filter, structural engineering. and length.
I. I NTRODUCTION The main contribution and novelty of the proposed approach
lies in the use of only a single camera to identify and
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584 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 65, NO. 3, MARCH 2016
explored. Moreover, artificial neural networks and wavelet 1) RGB is a colorspace originated from cathode ray tube
transformation for pavement distress image compression noise display application, when it was convenient to describe
reduction [5] can be used when coupled with the same color as a combination of three colored rays (RGB). It is
technique. one of the most widely used colorspaces for processing
A study called bidirectional empirical mode decomposi- and storing of digital images [11].
tion (BEMD) has been conducted for crack edge detection. 2) HSV colorspace was introduced when there was a need
Different techniques for edge detection such as Canny filter for the user to specify color properties numerically.
and Sobel methods have been compared in the BEMD study. It describes color with intuitive values, based on the
The final conclusion is that different edge detection techniques artist’s idea of tint, saturation, and tone. Hue defines
are more efficient for different types of surfaces. For instance, the dominant color (such as red, green, purple, and
it was reported that the Canny filter is more efficient to detect yellow) of an area, saturation measures its colorfulness
cracks on asphaltic concrete, while Sobel methods works better in proportion to its brightness, and the value is related
for Portland cement concrete [6]. to the color luminance [12].
Studies have been conducted using multifrequency [7], A digital image is represented by a matrix of n rows and m
wherein a fractional differentiation is used for high, medium, columns, where the number of columns represents the image
and low frequencies. Then, a wavelet transform is used for width and the number of rows represents the image height.
noise reduction and a difference histogram method is applied Moreover, each element (Px y ) = [R, G, B]T of the matrix is
to detect cracks on pavement. Finally, from the histogram, the the color intensity of the pixel at column x and row y of the
image can be segmented and the crack is recognized [8]. image.
Pattern recognition is another approach used to detect and The color distribution is discretized into m b. In the pro-
to classify cracks. To handle the high amount of input data, an posed approach, the histogram is calculated in RGB standard
image database was split into subsets. The system was then space using (8 × 8 × 8) b to represent the color spectrum, and
trained by human experts who manually selected the crack mathematically, the color histogram is represented by
regions for training. Three parametric and three nonparametric ⎡ ⎤
R
supervised classification strategies were introduced to detect
h(rgb) = C ⎣G ⎦ (1)
the cracks. The cracks were then classified as longitudinal,
B
transversal, and mixed by exploring the 2-D feature space [9].
that assigns the color at location (Px y ) corresponding to a
III. P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
matrix element (pixel).
In Section III-A, an explanation about the proposed archi- Color feature extraction is the technique to search for a
tecture is provided. Section III-B discusses the crack detection specified color composition in an image in comparison with
algorithm based on particle filter. Finally, Section III-C intro- a standard query color. Color feature extraction is based
duces the crack measurement algorithm to estimate width and on the observation of how often a color is used to encode
length of a crack using only a single image. functionality: grass is green, sky is blue, and so on [13].
Mapping the colors in an image L into a discrete color space
A. Architecture of the Proposed System containing a color h(rgb), each matrix element histogram
The use of cameras as the main sensor has several advan- h(Px y ) can be compared with the standard histogram h(rgb)
tages over traditional techniques [10]. However, a correct setup by Euclidean distance. Mathematically, this comparison is
of the components that make up the system is important to
Di = h(rgb) − h(Px y ) (2)
ensure the accuracy of measurements in the field.
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the crack measurement where nm is the matrix element position in an image L.
system proposed. The system is composed of an IP camera After obtaining the distances of each matrix element (Px y ),
to acquire images from the environment, a processing device weights are assigned to each particle using Gaussian
to process the crack detection and the crack measurement distribution
algorithms, a screen to show the results in real time, a remote
1 Di2
station to receive data from the processing device through Wi = √ exp − 2 (3)
a communication channel, and a database used to create a 2πσ 2σ
measurement history. Although the database appears as part of where σ is the variance for the random distribution. In our
the architecture, it will not be used for comparison purposes case, it represents the color spread around a crack and it ranges
as our focus is on the instrumentation and measurement. The from [−2, 2].
database is used to keep the history of the state of the cracks Particle filtering was originally developed to track objects
for maintenance purposes. in clutter. The state of a tracked object is described by the
vector X t , while the vector Z t denotes all the observations
B. Crack Detection Algorithm {z 1 , . . . , z t } up to time t [14]. Particle filters are often used
The particle filter proposed to recognize cracks is based on when the posterior density p(X t |Z t ) and the observation
a color model context. Color models describe different aspects density p(zt |X t ) are non-Gaussian.
of an image. Two models have emerged in the literature: The key idea of particle filtering is to approximate
red, green, and blue (RGB) and hue–saturation–value (HSV). the probability distribution by a weighted sample set
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LINS AND GIVIGI: AUTOMATIC CRACK DETECTION AND MEASUREMENT BASED ON IMAGE ANALYSIS 585
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LINS AND GIVIGI: AUTOMATIC CRACK DETECTION AND MEASUREMENT BASED ON IMAGE ANALYSIS 587
This procedure is repeated for several points in the curve in Fig. 7. Specimen model designed with its respective dimensions in
order to assess the average width of the crack. Alternatively, millimeters.
one could save the width of predetermined areas of crack
(borders, midsection, etc.) for future assessment.
IV. E XPERIMENTS
This section describes the experiment to assess the feasibil-
ity of the proposed methodology. In Section IV-A, an expla-
nation about the experimental setup is provided. Section IV-C
discusses the application of the proposed methodology.
Section IV-D shows the practical results obtained. Finally,
Section IV-E brings a discussion about the final results.
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TABLE II
C RACK D IMENSION U SING THE C RACK
D ETECTION A LGORITHM ( IN P IXELS )
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LINS AND GIVIGI: AUTOMATIC CRACK DETECTION AND MEASUREMENT BASED ON IMAGE ANALYSIS 589
TABLE III
C RACK D IMENSION P ROCESSED U SING THE C RACK M EASUREMENT A LGORITHM
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[5] P. Subirats, J. Dumoulin, V. Legeay, and D. Barba, “Automation of pave- of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil.
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in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Image Process., Oct. 2006, pp. 3037–3040. Computer Engineering, Royal Military College of
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