Building Surface Crack Detection Using Deep Learning Technology

Cracks in building facades are inevitable due to the age of the building. Cracks found in the building facade may be further exacerbated if not corrected immediately. Considering the extensive size of some buildings, there is definitely a need to automate the inspection routine to facilitate the inspection process. The incorporation of deep learning technology for the classification of images has proven to be an effective method in many past civil infrastructures like pavements and bridges. There is, however, limited research in the built environment sector. In order to align with the Smart Nation goals of the country, the use of Smart technologies is necessary in the building and construction industry. The focus of the study is to identify the effectiveness of deep learning technology for image classification. Deep learning technology, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), requires a large amount of data in order to obtain good performance. It is, however, difficult to collect the images manually. This study will cover the transfer learning approach, where image classification can be carried out even with limited data. Using the CNN method achieved an accuracy level of about 89%, while using the transfer learning model achieved an accuracy of 94%. Based on this, it can be concluded that the transfer learning method achieves better performance as compared to the CNN method with the same amount of data input.