# YOLOv5s-GTB: light-weighted and improved YOLOv5s for bridge crack detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01498/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2022.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [On the Relationship between Self-Attention and Convolutional Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03584/) (2019)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Road Crack Detection Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Adaptive Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08582/) (2019)
- [Automatic Defect Segmentation on Leather with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12139/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In response to the situation that the conventional bridge crack manual detection method has a large amount of human and material resources wasted, this study is aimed to propose a light-weighted, high-precision, deep learning-based bridge apparent crack recognition model that can be deployed in mobile devices' scenarios. In order to enhance the performance of YOLOv5, firstly, the data augmentation methods are supplemented, and then the YOLOv5 series algorithm is trained to select a suitable basic framework. The YOLOv5s is identified as the basic framework for the light-weighted crack detection model through experiments for comparison and validation.By replacing the traditional DarkNet backbone network of YOLOv5s with GhostNet backbone network, introducing Transformer multi-headed self-attention mechanism and bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) to replace the commonly used feature pyramid network, the improved model not only has 42% fewer parameters and faster inference response, but also significantly outperforms the original model in terms of accuracy and mAP (8.5% and 1.1% improvement, respectively). Luckily each improved part has a positive impact on the result. This paper provides a feasible idea to establish a digital operation management system in the field of highway and bridge in the future and to implement the whole life cycle structure health monitoring of civil infrastructure in China.