# Automating Visual Blockage Classification of Culverts with Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03232/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blockage of culverts by transported debris materials is reported as main contributor in originating urban flash floods. Conventional modelling approaches had no success in addressing the problem largely because of unavailability of peak floods hydraulic data and highly non-linear behaviour of debris at culvert. This article explores a new dimension to investigate the issue by proposing the use of Intelligent Video Analytic (IVA) algorithms for extracting blockage related information. Potential of using existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithms (i.e., DarkNet53, DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, InceptionV3, MobileNet, ResNet50, VGG16, EfficientNetB3, NASNet) is investigated over a custom collected blockage dataset (i.e., Images of Culvert Openings and Blockage (ICOB)) to predict the blockage in a given image. Models were evaluated based on their performance on test dataset (i.e., accuracy, loss, precision, recall, F1-score, Jaccard-Index), Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPs) and response times to process a single test instance. From the results, NASNet was reported most efficient in classifying the blockage with the accuracy of 85%; however, EfficientNetB3 was recommended for the hardware implementation because of its improved response time with accuracy comparable to NASNet (i.e., 83%). False Negative (FN) instances, False Positive (FP) instances and CNN layers activation suggested that background noise and oversimplified labelling criteria were two contributing factors in degraded performance of existing CNN algorithms.