Enhancing non-destructive testing in concrete structures: a GADF-CNN approach for defect detection

This research introduces a novel approach for detecting defects in concrete structures. It utilizes the Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF) in combination with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) enhanced by depthwise separable convolutions and attention mechanisms. The key contribution of this work is the use of GADF to transform one-dimensional impact-echo signals into two-dimensional images, thereby improving feature extraction and computational efficiency for analysis by the CNN. This advancement offers a new perspective in non-destructive testing technologies for concrete infrastructure. Comprehensive evaluation on a varied dataset of concrete structural defects reveals that our GADF-CNN model achieves an impressive test accuracy of 98.24 %, surpassing conventional models like VGG16, ResNet18, DenseNet, and ResNeXt50, and excelling in precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. Ultimately, this study enhances the integration of sophisticated image transformation techniques with deep learning, contributing to safer and more durable concrete infrastructure, and represents a noteworthy development in the field.