Segmenting Without Annotating: Crack Segmentation and Monitoring via Post-Hoc Classifier Explanations

Monitoring the cracks in walls, roads and other types of infrastructure is essential to ensure the safety of a structure, and plays an important role in structural health monitoring. Automatic visual inspection allows an efficient, cost-effective and safe health monitoring, especially in hard-to-reach locations. To this aim, data-driven approaches based on machine learning have demonstrated their effectiveness, at the expense of annotating large sets of images for supervised training. Once a damage has been detected, one also needs to monitor the evolution of its severity, in order to trigger a timely maintenance operation and avoid any catastrophic consequence. This evaluation requires a precise segmentation of the damage. However, pixel-level annotation of images for segmentation is labor-intensive. On the other hand, labeling images for a classification task is relatively cheap in comparison. To circumvent the cost of annotating images for segmentation, recent works inspired by explainable AI (XAI) have proposed to use the post-hoc explanations of a classifier to obtain a segmentation of the input image. In this work, we study the application of XAI techniques to the detection and monitoring of cracks in masonry wall surfaces. We benchmark different post-hoc explainability methods in terms of segmentation quality and accuracy of the damage severity quantification (for example, the width of a crack), thus enabling timely decision-making.

Keywords: Crack detection, Image classification, Segmentation, Explainable AI, Attribution maps.

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