Crack Detection on Asphalt Runway Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Data With Non-Crack Object Removal and Deep Learning Methods

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles are extensively utilized for image acquisition in a cheap, fast, and effective way. In this study, an automatic crack detection method with non-crack object removal and deep learning-based approaches are developed and tested on images captured by unmanned aerial vehicle. The motivation of this study is to detect either a crack exists or not in the asphalt-runway. The novelty of this study lies in integrating a non-crack artifact removal process with six classical edge detectors and comparing the resulting performance with four lightweight CNN models on the same UAV-acquired runway image dataset, enabling a unified evaluation of classical and learning-based approaches. For deep learning-based approach, four lightweight CNN models, namely GoogleNet, SqueezeNet, MobileNetv2, and ShuffleNet, are trained and the best accuracy of 87.9 is obtained whenever GoogleNet model is used. For the non-crack object removal approach, exclusion of non-crack objects from the images is the first step, where crack-detection which makes use of edge-detection techniques is the latter. In the study, Sobel, Prewitt, Canny, Laplacian of Gaussian, Roberts and Zero Cross edge detection algorithms are examined and their success rates in detecting cracks are comparatively presented. With sensitivity=0.981, specificity=0.744, accuracy=0.917, precision=0.912 and F-score=0.945 values Canny algorithm performs significantly better than others in detecting the cracks. This study provides enough evidence for the practicability of automated crack detection on unprocessed digital photographs by the results of the study conducted on asphalt runway. © (c) 2025 Tapkın, S., Tercan, E., Bostan, A. and Şengül, G. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/