DPNet: Dual-Path Network for Real-Time Object Detection With Lightweight Attention

Deep neural networks for automated damage classification in image-based visual data of reinforced concrete structures

Significant strides in deep learning for image recognition have expanded the potential of visual data in assessing damage to reinforced concrete (RC) structures. Our study proposes an automated technique, merging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and fully convolutional networks (FCNs), to detect, classify, and segment building damage. These deep networks extract RC damage-related features from high-resolution smartphone images (3264 × 2448 pixels), categorized into two groups: damage (exposed reinforcement and spalled concrete) and undamaged area. With a labeled dataset of 2000 images, fine-tuning of network architecture and hyperparameters ensures effective training and testing. Remarkably, we achieve 98.75 % accuracy in damage classification and 95.98 % in segmentation, without overfitting. Both CNNs and FCNs play crucial roles in extracting features, showcasing the adaptability of deep learning. Our promising results validate the potential of these techniques for inspectors, providing an effective means to assess the severity of identified damage in image-based evaluations.

A Lightweight and Efficient Multi-Type Defect Detection Method for Transmission Lines Based on DCP-YOLOv8

Currently, the intelligent defect detection of massive grid transmission line inspection pictures using AI image recognition technology is an efficient and popular method. Usually, there are two technical routes for the construction of defect detection algorithm models: one is to use a lightweight network, which improves the efficiency, but it can generally only target a few types of defects and may reduce the detection accuracy; the other is to use a complex network model, which improves the accuracy, and can identify multiple types of defects at the same time, but it has a large computational volume and low efficiency. To maintain the model's high detection accuracy as well as its lightweight structure, this paper proposes a lightweight and efficient multi type defect detection method for transmission lines based on DCP-YOLOv8. The method employs deformable convolution (C2f_DCNv3) to enhance the defect feature extraction capability, and designs a re-parameterized cross phase feature fusion structure (RCSP) to optimize and fuse high-level semantic features with low level spatial features, thus improving the capability of the model to recognize defects at different scales while significantly reducing the model parameters; additionally, it combines the dynamic detection head and deformable convolutional v3's detection head (DCNv3-Dyhead) to enhance the feature expression capability and the utilization of contextual information to further improve the detection accuracy. Experimental results show that on a dataset containing 20 real transmission line defects, the method increases the average accuracy (mAP@0.5) to 72.2%, an increase of 4.3%, compared with the lightest baseline YOLOv8n model; the number of model parameters is only 2.8 M, a reduction of 9.15%, and the number of processed frames per second (FPS) reaches 103, which meets the real time detection demand. In the scenario of multi type defect detection, it effectively balances detection accuracy and performance with quantitative generalizability.