# Weakly Supervised Patch Label Inference Networks for Efficient Pavement Distress Detection and Recognition in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (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)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [Lookahead Optimizer: k steps forward, 1 step back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08610/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network for Pavement Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06340/) (2019)
- [Automatic Pavement Crack Detection Based on Structured Prediction with the Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02208/) (2018)
- [An Iteratively Optimized Patch Label Inference Network for Automatic Pavement Distress Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13298/) (2020)
- [Contrastive learning of Class-agnostic Activation Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13505/) (2022)
- [Surface Defect Detection and Evaluation for Marine Vessels using Multi-Stage Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09580/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PicT: A Slim Weakly Supervised Vision Transformer for Pavement Distress Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10074/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic image-based pavement distress detection and recognition are vital for pavement maintenance and management. However, existing deep learning-based methods largely omit the specific characteristics of pavement images, such as high image resolution and low distress area ratio, and are not end-to-end trainable. In this paper, we present a series of simple yet effective end-to-end deep learning approaches named Weakly Supervised Patch Label Inference Networks (WSPLIN) for efficiently addressing these tasks under various application settings. WSPLIN transforms the fully supervised pavement image classification problem into a weakly supervised pavement patch classification problem for solutions. Specifically, WSPLIN first divides the pavement image under different scales into patches with different collection strategies and then employs a Patch Label Inference Network (PLIN) to infer the labels of these patches to fully exploit the resolution and scale information. Notably, we design a patch label sparsity constraint based on the prior knowledge of distress distribution and leverage the Comprehensive Decision Network (CDN) to guide the training of PLIN in a weakly supervised way. Therefore, the patch labels produced by PLIN provide interpretable intermediate information, such as the rough location and the type of distress. We evaluate our method on a large-scale bituminous pavement distress dataset named CQU-BPDD and the augmented Crack500 (Crack500-PDD) dataset, which is a newly constructed pavement distress detection dataset augmented from the Crack500. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baselines in both performance and efficiency. The source codes of WSPLIN are released on https://github.com/DearCaat/wsplin.