EMS-UKAN: An Efficient KAN-Based Segmentation Network for Water Leakage Detection of Subway Tunnel Linings

Water leakage in subway tunnel linings poses significant risks to structural safety and long-term durability, making accurate and efficient leakage detection a critical task. Existing deep learning methods, such as UNet and its variants, often suffer from large parameter sizes and limited ability to capture multi-scale features, which restrict their applicability in real-world tunnel inspection. To address these issues, we propose an Efficient Multi-Scale U-shaped KAN-based Segmentation Network (EMS-UKAN) for detecting water leakage in subway tunnel linings. To reduce computational cost and enable edge-device deployment, the backbone replaces conventional convolutional layers with depthwise separable convolutions, and an Edge-Enhanced Depthwise Separable Convolution Module (EEDM) is incorporated in the decoder to strengthen boundary representation. The PKAN Block is introduced in the bottleneck to enhance nonlinear feature representation and improve the modeling of complex relationships among latent features. In addition, an Adaptive Multi-Scale Feature Extraction Block (AMS Block) is embedded within early skip connections to capture both fine-grained and large-scale leakage features. Extensive experiments on the newly collected Tunnel Water Leakage (TWL) dataset demonstrate that EMS-UKAN outperforms classical models, achieving competitive segmentation performance. In addition, it effectively reduces computational complexity, providing a practical solution for real-world tunnel inspection.