# CrackUDA: Incremental Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Improved Crack Segmentation in Civil Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15637/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02649/) (2016)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [DLOW: Domain Flow for Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05418/) (2018)
- [Instance Adaptive Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12197/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05427/) (2019)
- [Classes Matter: A Fine-grained Adversarial Approach to Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09222/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [Self-Ensembling with GAN-based Data Augmentation for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00589/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network for Pavement Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06340/) (2019)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Multi-Domain Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12205/) (2021)
- [CrackSeg9k: A Collection and Benchmark for Crack Segmentation Datasets and Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13054/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Adversarial Residual Transform Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09578/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Surface Crack Segmentation by Generating Pseudo-Labels using Localization with a Classifier and Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00456/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crack segmentation plays a crucial role in ensuring the structural integrity and seismic safety of civil structures. However, existing crack segmentation algorithms encounter challenges in maintaining accuracy with domain shifts across datasets. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep network that employs incremental training with unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) using adversarial learning, without a significant drop in accuracy in the source domain. Our approach leverages an encoder-decoder architecture, consisting of both domain-invariant and domain-specific parameters. The encoder learns shared crack features across all domains, ensuring robustness to domain variations. Simultaneously, the decoder's domain-specific parameters capture domain-specific features unique to each domain. By combining these components, our model achieves improved crack segmentation performance. Furthermore, we introduce BuildCrack, a new crack dataset comparable to sub-datasets of the well-established CrackSeg9K dataset in terms of image count and crack percentage. We evaluate our proposed approach against state-of-the-art UDA methods using different sub-datasets of CrackSeg9K and our custom dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in crack segmentation accuracy and generalization across target domains compared to other UDA methods - specifically, an improvement of 0.65 and 2.7 mIoU on source and target domains respectively.
