Cross-View and Cross-Time Tracking of Crack Evolution in Concrete
Authors: Pengru Deng, Jiapeng Yao, Su Wang, Xuhui He, Zhao Wang, Takanori Emaru, Takashi Matsumoto, Xinrun Li
Organizations: School of Civil Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China · Nvidia, Shanghai, China · Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-8628, Japan · School of Computing, Newcastle University, Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
Crack propagation provides richer information than static crack observations for evaluating structural conditions of concrete infrastructure and planning maintenance strategies. Unlike static crack detection, which can now be largely automated using computer vision, vision-based crack tracking is a coupled cross-view and cross-time problem: the same physical crack must retain its identity as camera viewpoints change, while newly developed growth must be distinguished from existing crack segments in a unified reference view. Existing segmentation and 3D reconstruction methods can recover crack masks or scene geometry, but they do not preserve crack identity across views or quantify temporal extension. To address this gap, this study formulates crack growth monitoring as a cross-view and cross-time crack-instance tracking task and proposes a geometry-assisted, morphology-aware framework. The framework first uses image-based geometric registration to align observations from different viewpoints into a shared structural reference, then applies morphology-aware instantiation to assign physically interpretable crack identities, and finally performs temporal mapping in the unified view to distinguish newly developed growth from existing crack segments. To enable evaluation, a temporally annotated dataset was established and used, covering three representative cracking scenarios: single dominant crack propagation, mixed-mode branching, and multiple-crack interaction, with pixel-level masks and cross-time instance labels. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can establish loose cross-view identity correspondence under changing viewpoints, while strict spatial overlap and growth localization remain limited by early micro-crack segmentability and projection drift, highlighting directions for future crack-monitoring research.
Reliable crack assessment requires not only accurate pixel-level masks but also connected crack geometry and confidence estimates that remain stable under domain shift. However, existing segmentation models can achieve high overlap scores while fragmenting cracks, missing fine branches, and providing no calibrated uncertainty. To address this gap, this paper proposes CrackGeoFM, a multi-task framework that combines a frozen visual foundation backbone with crack-specific adaptation for mask prediction, skeleton reconstruction, and uncertainty estimation. The framework integrates a Frequency-Guided Crack Enhancement Module (FCEM) to enhance high-frequency crack cues, a Crack-Domain Feature Adaptation Module (CFAM) to adapt frozen backbone features to crack-domain patterns, and a Structure-Aware Multi-Task Decoder (SMTD) to jointly decode masks, skeletons, and uncertainty. Across 20 crack datasets, CrackGeoFM achieves state-of-the-art segmentation, improved topology preservation, calibrated uncertainty, and effective few-shot adaptation with only five labeled images. These results support reliable, generalizable, and engineering-oriented crack analysis for infrastructure assessment.
Reliable crack detection and segmentation are vital for structural health monitoring, yet the scarcity of well-annotated data constitutes a major challenge. To address this limitation, we propose a novel context-aware generative framework designed to synthesize realistic crack growth patterns for data augmentation. Unlike existing methods that primarily manipulate textures or background content, CrackForward explicitly models crack morphology by combining directional crack elongation with learned thickening and branching. Our framework integrates two key innovations: (i) a contextually guided crack expansion module, which uses local directional cues and adaptive random walk to simulate realistic propagation paths; and (ii) a two-stage U-Net-style generator that learns to reproduce spatially varying crack characteristics such as thickness, branching, and growth. Experimental results show that the generated samples preserve target-stage saturation and thickness characteristics and improve the performance of several crack segmentation architectures. These results indicate that structure-aware synthetic crack generation can provide more informative training data than conventional augmentation alone.
Nassim Sadallah, Mohand Saïd Allili
LARIVIA Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering · Gatineau, QC, Canada
Recent crack segmentation methods often follow generic semantic segmentation designs, using stronger backbones, hybrid CNN-Transformer-Mamba encoders, and auxiliary enhancement branches. Although effective, this raises whether stronger generic feature mixing is the most suitable direction for crack segmentation. We instead formulate crack segmentation as sparse structural recovery. Cracks have limited category-level semantics but strong morphological regularities, being thin, sparse, anisotropic, locally fragmented, and easily confused with textures or shadows. Thus, the key bottleneck lies in preserving weak structural evidence, recovering directional continuity, and suppressing background coupling. We propose RIFT, a compact family of morphology-aligned crack segmentation models. Rather than compressing a complex generic architecture, RIFT is simple by design, preserving local evidence, aggregating cooperative directional continuity, and restoring crack structures through lightweight multi-scale fusion. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that RIFT achieves the best or tied-best results across the 16 main metrics against reproduced representative baselines. RIFT-B gives the strongest overall accuracy, while RIFT-T provides the best deployment efficiency with only 0.47M parameters and high inference speed. Topology-aware evaluation, ablations, transfer experiments, and visualizations further verify that task-aligned simplicity can match or surpass complex hybrid architectures when its inductive bias fits crack morphology. Code: https://github.com/xauat-liushipeng/RIFT