[IMC 2023] Segmenting Without Annotating Crack Segmentation Monitoring

Описание: By Dr. Florent Forest, EPFL
Monitoring the cracks in walls, roads and other types of infrastructure is essential to ensure the safety of a structure. Automatic visual inspection allows an efficient, cost-effective and safe health monitoring, especially in hard-to-reach locations. To this aim, data-driven approaches based on machine learning have demonstrated their effectiveness, at the expense of annotating large sets of images for supervised training. Once a damage has been detected, one also needs to monitor the evolution of its severity, in order to trigger a timely maintenance operation. This evaluation requires a precise segmentation of the damage. However, pixel-level annotation of images for segmentation is labor-intensive. To circumvent the cost of annotating images for segmentation, recent works inspired by explainable AI (XAI) have proposed to use the post-hoc explanations of a classifier to obtain a segmentation of the input image. In this work, we study the application of XAI techniques to the detection and monitoring of cracks in masonry wall surfaces and concrete railway sleepers.