Road crack segmentation using an attention residual U-Net with generative adversarial learning

This paper proposed an end-to-end road crack segmentation model based on attention mechanism and deep FCN with generative adversarial learning. We create a segmentation network by introducing a visual attention mechanism and residual module to a fully convolutional network(FCN) to capture richer local features and more global semantic features and get a better segment result. Besides, we use an adversarial network consisting of convolutional layers as a discrimination network. The main contributions of this work are as follows: 1) We introduce a CNN model as a discriminate network to realize adversarial learning to guide the training of the segmentation network, which is trained in a min-max way: the discrimination network is trained by maximizing the loss function, while the segmentation network is trained with the only gradient passed by the discrimination network and aim at minimizing the loss function, and finally an optimal segmentation network is obtained; 2) We add the residual modular and the visual attention mechanism to U-Net, which makes the segmentation results more robust, refined and smooth; 3) Extensive experiments are conducted on three public road crack datasets to evaluate the performance of our proposed model. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between the proposed method and the state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed method outperforms or is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods in both F1 score and precision. In particular, compared with U-Net, the mIoU of our proposed method is increased about 3%similar to 17% compared with the three public datasets.