Comparative analysis of deep learning models for crack detection in buildings

Life-time of the buildings is generally challenged by the act of nature. In-spite of the fact that the constructions provide minimum guarantee on quality and durability, certain mismatch in the composition of the materials, stress on the building, and chemical or physical imbalance of the materials, lead to surface crack. Cracks are also generated due to the shuffle of climatic conditions, which leads to the contraction and expansion of the building surfaces, and other damages. The guarantee on building safety and serviceability depends on how these buildings are successfully assessed and maintained. The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, provide favourable solutions in-order to handle, manage and solve building cracks, through analysis using deep image neural network models, that perform classification of the building with crack images. As a result, a critical challenge for many civil engineering applications is the precise, quick, and automated identification of cracks on structural surfaces is addressed with the solutions provided by the deep image neural networks. In this research, we tackle the research gap and data scarcity by developing and curating a novel deep learning image processing for detecting cracks in brickwork. We also train and validate several deep learning models to classify brickwork images as either cracked or normal. The dataset of the proposed work contains 24,000 images which are classified through binary classes. These classes are generated for crack and non-crack images. The various parameters such as Batch size, Pooling, Activation functions Learning-rate, Kernel-Size, Normalization, and Optimizers are used for the evaluation of the model. The proposed work performs a comparative analysis of four deep image models such as Inception V3, VGG-16, RESNET-50 VGG-19, Inception ResNetV2 and CNN-RES MLP. With the analysis of all these models, the Inception V3 provides the best of all with the accuracy value of 99.98%. The InceptionV3 tops the Precision value of 99.99% and RESNET-50 tops the Recall value of 99.98%. The IncpetionV2 provided the best of the Region of Convergence value of 0.9999 which is the best among all the models for reliable and stable performance.