Abstract
Automatic pavement crack detection plays an important role in ensuring road safety.In images of cracks,information about the cracks can be conveyed through high-frequency and low-fre-quency signals that focus on fine details and global structures,respectively.The output features obtained from different convolutional layers can be combined to represent information about both high-frequency and low-frequency signals.In this paper,we propose an encoder-decoder framework called octave hierarchical network(Octave-H),which is based on the U-Network(U-Net)architec-ture and utilizes an octave convolutional neural network and a hierarchical feature learning module for performing crack detection.The proposed octave convolution is capable of extracting multi-fre-quency feature maps,capturing both fine details and global cracks.We propose a hierarchical fea-ture learning module that merges multi-frequency-scale feature maps with different levels(high and low)of octave convolutional layers.To verify the superiority of the proposed Octave-H,we employed the CrackForest dataset(CFD)and AigleRN databases to evaluate this method.The experimental results demonstrate that Octave-H outperforms other algorithms with satisfactory per-formance.