Segment Any Crack: Deep Semantic Segmentation Adaptation for Crack Detection

Image-based crack detection algorithms are increasingly in demand in infrastructure monitoring, as early detection of cracks is of paramount importance for timely maintenance planning. While deep learning has significantly advanced crack detection algorithms, existing models often require extensive labeled data sets and high computational costs for fine-tuning, limiting their adaptability across diverse conditions. This study introduces an efficient selective fine-tuning strategy, focusing on tuning normalization components, to enhance the adaptability of segmentation models for crack detection. The proposed method is applied to the segment anything model (SAM) and five well-established segmentation models. Experimental results demonstrate that selective fine-tuning of only normalization parameters outperforms full fine-tuning and other common fine-tuning techniques in both performance and computational efficiency, while improving generalization. The proposed approach yields a SAM-based model, segment any crack (SAC), achieving a 61.22% F1-score and 44.13% IoU on the OmniCrack30k benchmark data set, along with the highest performance across three zero-shot data sets and the lowest standard deviation. The results highlight the effectiveness of the adaptation approach in improving segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing computational overhead.