Boundary-Sensitive Hybrid Attention Network for Multi-Scale Crack Fine Segmentation

Concrete crack segmentation in bridge health monitoring is crucial for ensuring the safety and longevity of infrastructure. However, this task is complicated by challenges such as weak contrast, background interference, and multi-scale crack structures, which hinder traditional methods’ accuracy. This study introduces a novel Boundary-Sensitive Hybrid Attention Network (BSA-Net) designed to address these issues by combining a hierarchical Transformer encoder (Hiera-A), a multi-scale context module (Light-ASPP), and a boundary-aware decoder (BAD). The hierarchical encoder effectively captures multi-scale features, while Light-ASPP enhances the network’s ability to aggregate contextual information with minimal computational cost, making it suitable for large-scale applications. The dual-branch decoder explicitly decouples the learning of semantic segmentation and boundary prediction, ensuring more accurate boundary detection and crack continuity. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that BSA-Net consistently outperforms existing crack detection models, particularly in complex, noisy environments. The model achieves competitive performance in terms of segmentation accuracy, boundary clarity, and recall rates, particularly for fine-scale and weak contrast cracks. The results indicate that BSA-Net not only enhances the performance of crack segmentation in real-world conditions but also provides a scalable and reliable solution for automated infrastructure monitoring and defect detection.