Anti-interference framework for weakly supervised thermal defect segmentation on high-rise building facades
Infrared thermography is crucial for ensuring the structural safety of high-rise building facades, yet accurate defect quantification typically requires expensive pixel-level fully supervised annotations. While weakly supervised semantic segmentation reduces annotation costs, existing methods struggle with low-quality pseudo-labels and inaccurate boundaries in infrared images. To address this problem, this paper proposes an anti-interference-driven segmentation framework for infrared facade defects, in which the SAM 2 segmentation stage is trained under weak supervision using box prompts and pseudo-mask guidance. Firstly, an improved DeepLabV3+ interference rejection module is constructed, incorporating a boundary-aware triplet loss and simple linear iterative clustering superpixel consistency constraints to eliminate pseudo-thermal anomalies. Secondly, YOLOV11 is trained to localize defects on the interference-suppressed images and provides bounding box prompts for the subsequent SAM 2 segmentation stage. Finally, a weakly supervised fine-tuning strategy based on the segment anything model 2 is proposed, where box prompts and pseudo-mask supervision are used for pixel-level mask learning without relying on manually annotated defect masks during the segmentation training stage. Validated on 180 infrared images from 50 high-rise buildings, the method achieves interference rejection (mean Intersection over Union of 76.2%) and precise localization (mean average precision at 0.5 of 86.5%). Furthermore, it attains pixel-level segmentation with 63.4% Miou, 87.0% F1, 83.1% precision, 91.3% recall, and 92.2% [email protected] using only box-level annotations. This study demonstrates the feasibility of high-precision thermal defect segmentation for large-scale facade inspection.
Authors
- Dingcheng Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5843-9428)
- Zeming Zhao
- Daiming Liu
- Yongqiang Jin
- Kaimu Wei
Institutions
- Sichuan University (CN)
- Metallurgical Corporation of China (China) (CN)
- Sichuan University of Science and Engineering (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2026-05-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-54154-3
- Primary Topic
- Thermography and Photoacoustic Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00