# Rethinking Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks for Efficient and High-quality Pavement Crack Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02147/) (2016)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)
- [Richer Convolutional Features for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02103/) (2016)
- [Transformation Consistent Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00348/) (2019)
- [Fast-SCNN: Fast Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04502/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network for Pavement Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06340/) (2019)
- [Bi-Directional Cascade Network for Perceptual Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10903/) (2019)
- [Towards Unsupervised Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06219/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Analysis of Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Different Image Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11186/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Context-CrackNet: A Context-Aware Framework for Precise Segmentation of Tiny Cracks in Pavement images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14413/) (2025)
- [MixerCSeg: An Efficient Mixer Architecture for Crack Segmentation via Decoupled Mamba Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01361/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Efficient Crack Segmentation with Task-Aligned Structural-Directional Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31048/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pixel-level road crack detection has always been a challenging task in intelligent transportation systems. Due to the external environments, such as weather, light, and other factors, pavement cracks often present low contrast, poor continuity, and different sizes in length and width. However, most of the existing studies pay less attention to crack data under different situations. Meanwhile, recent algorithms based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have promoted the development of cutting-edge models for crack detection. Nevertheless, they usually focus on complex models for good performance, but ignore detection efficiency in practical applications. In this article, to address the first issue, we collected two new databases (i.e. Rain365 and Sun520) captured in rainy and sunny days respectively, which enrich the data of the open source community. For the second issue, we reconsider how to improve detection efficiency with excellent performance, and then propose our lightweight encoder-decoder architecture termed CarNet. Specifically, we introduce a novel olive-shaped structure for the encoder network, a light-weight multi-scale block and a new up-sampling method in the decoder network. Numerous experiments show that our model can better balance detection performance and efficiency compared with previous models. Especially, on the Sun520 dataset, our CarNet significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance with ODS F-score from 0.488 to 0.514. Meanwhile, it does so with an improved detection speed (104 frame per second) which is orders of magnitude faster than some recent DCNNs-based algorithms specially designed for crack detection.