SKPNet: snake KAN perceive bridge cracks through semantic segmentation

As the demands for ensuring bridge safety continue to rise, crack detection technology has become more crucial than ever. In this context, deep learning methods have been widely applied in the field of intelligent crack detection for bridges. However, existing methods are often constrained by complex backgrounds and computational limitations, struggling with issues such as weak crack continuity and insufficient detail representation. Inspired by biological mechanisms, a dynamic snake convolution (DSC) with tubular offsets is incorporated to tackle these challenges effectively. Additionally, a channel-wise self-attention (CWSA) mechanism is introduced to efficiently fuse multi-scale features in U-Net, significantly enhancing the ability of the model to capture fine details. In the classification head, the traditional linear layer is replaced with a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN) structure, which strengthens the robustness and generalization capacity of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model improves detection accuracy, achieving a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.877, while maintaining almost the same number of parameters, showcasing exceptional performance and practical applicability. Our project is released at https://github.com/ruanyudi/KanSeg-Bi .