An efficient method for identifying surface damage in hydraulic concrete buildings

Traditional hydraulic structures rely on manual visual inspection for apparent integrity, which is not only time-consuming and labour-intensive but also inefficient. The efficacy of deep learning models is frequently constrained by the size of available data, resulting in limited scalability and flexibility. Furthermore, the paucity of data diversity leads to a singular function of the model that cannot provide comprehensive decision support for improving maintenance measures. This paper proposes an efficacious methodology for identifying diverse apparent damages in hydraulic structures to address the limitations of existing technologies. The advanced features of apparent damage in hydraulic structures were elucidated by fine-tuning the top-level parameters of the lightweight pre-trained model, thereby mitigating the data dependency issue inherent in the model. Ensemble learning algorithms are employed to classify high-dimensional samples to enhance the accuracy and stability of the classification. However, ensemble learning algorithms are subject to time consuming issues when applied to high-dimensional datasets. To this end, we propose a robust discriminative feature selection model to identify the most salient features, thereby enhancing the performance of apparent damage recognition in hydraulic structures while concurrently reducing the inference time. The results demonstrated that the accuracies of this method in identifying crack, fracture, hole and normal structures were 87.65%, 87.82%, 96.99%, and 95.25%, respectively. This methodology exhibits significant applicability and practical value for the intelligent inspection of hydraulic structures.