VDCrackGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network with Transformer for Pavement Crack Data Augmentation

Addressing the challenge of limited samples arising from the difficulty and high cost of pavement crack, image collecting and labeling, along with the inadequate ability of traditional data augmentation methods to enhance sample feature space, we propose VDCrackGAN, a generative adversarial network combining VAE and DCGAN, specifically tailored for pavement crack data augmentation. Furthermore, spectral normalization is incorporated to enhance the stability of network training, and the self-attention mechanism Swin Transformer is integrated into the network to further improve the quality of crack generation. Experimental outcomes reveal that in comparison to the baseline DCGAN, VDCrackGAN achieves notable improvements of 13.6% and 26.4% in the Inception Score (IS) and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) metrics, respectively.