SECrackSeg: A High-Accuracy Crack Segmentation Network Based on Proposed UNet with SAM2 S-Adapter and Edge-Aware Attention

Crack segmentation is essential for structural health monitoring and infrastructure maintenance, playing a crucial role in early damage detection and safety risk reduction. Traditional methods, including digital image processing techniques have limitations in complex environments. Deep learning-based methods have shown potential, but still face challenges, such as poor generalization with limited samples, insufficient extraction of fine-grained features, feature loss during upsampling, and inadequate capture of crack edge details. This study proposes SECrackSeg, a high-accuracy crack segmentation network that integrates an improved UNet architecture, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), MI-Upsampling, and an Edge-Aware Attention mechanism. The key innovations include: (1) using a SAM2 S-Adapter with a frozen backbone to enhance generalization in low-data scenarios; (2) employing a Multi-Scale Dilated Convolution (MSDC) module to promote multi-scale feature fusion; (3) introducing MI-Upsampling to reduce feature loss during upsampling; and (4) implementing an Edge-Aware Attention mechanism to improve crack edge segmentation precision. Additionally, a custom loss function incorporating weighted binary cross-entropy and weighted IoU loss is utilized to emphasize challenging pixels. This function also applies Multi-Granularity Supervision by optimizing segmentation outputs at three different resolution levels, ensuring better feature consistency and improved model robustness across varying image scales. Experimental results show that SECrackSeg achieves higher precision, recall, F1-score, and mIoU scores on the CFD, Crack500, and DeepCrack datasets compared to state-of-the-art models, demonstrating its excellent performance in fine-grained feature recognition, edge segmentation, and robustness.