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.

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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
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article

Anti-interference framework for weakly supervised thermal defect segmentation on high-rise building facades

Dingcheng Zhang, Zeming Zhao, Daiming Liu, Yongqiang Jin et al.
Scientific Reports
Thermography and Photoacoustic Techniques
article

Anti-interference framework for weakly supervised thermal defect segmentation on high-rise building facades

Dingcheng Zhang, Zeming Zhao, Daiming Liu, Yongqiang Jin, Kaimu Wei
article en

Abstract

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.

Scientific Reports
Sichuan University (CN), Metallurgical Corporation of China (China) (CN), Sichuan University of Science and Engineering (CN)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 9%
Thermography and Photoacoustic Techniques
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Anti-interference framework for weakly supervised thermal defect segmentation on high-rise building facades — Dingcheng Zhang, Zeming Zhao, et al. · Scientific Reports (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS