# Infrastructure Crack Segmentation: Boundary Guidance Method and Benchmark Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09196/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cracks provide an essential indicator of infrastructure performance degradation, and achieving high-precision pixel-level crack segmentation is an issue of concern. Unlike the common research paradigms that adopt novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods directly, this paper examines the inherent characteristics of cracks so as to introduce boundary features into crack identification and then builds a boundary guidance crack segmentation model (BGCrack) with targeted structures and modules, including a high frequency module, global information modeling module, joint optimization module, etc. Extensive experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed designs and the effectiveness of the edge information in improving segmentation results. In addition, considering that notable open-source datasets mainly consist of asphalt pavement cracks because of ease of access, there is no standard and widely recognized dataset yet for steel structures, one of the primary structural forms in civil infrastructure. This paper provides a steel crack dataset that establishes a unified and fair benchmark for the identification of steel cracks.