Zhili He

Zhili He, Wang Chen, Jian Zhang et al.

Cracks provide an essential indicator of infrastructure performance degradation, and achieving high-precision pixel-level crack segmentation is an issue of concern. Unlike the common research paradigms that adopt novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods directly, this paper examines the inherent characteristics of cracks so as to introduce boundary features into crack identification and then builds a boundary guidance crack segmentation model (BGCrack) with targeted structures and modules, including a high frequency module, global information modeling module, joint optimization module, etc. Extensive experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed designs and the effectiveness of the edge information in improving segmentation results. In addition, considering that notable open-source datasets mainly consist of asphalt pavement cracks because of ease of access, there is no standard and widely recognized dataset yet for steel structures, one of the primary structural forms in civil infrastructure. This paper provides a steel crack dataset that establishes a unified and fair benchmark for the identification of steel cracks.

Zhili He, Yu-Hsing Wang, Jian Zhang

AI-based structural design represents a transformative approach that addresses the inefficiencies inherent in traditional structural design practices. This paper innovates the existing AI-based design frameworks from four aspects and proposes Generative AIBIM: an intelligent design pipeline that integrates BIM and generative AI. First, the proposed pipeline not only broadens the application scope of BIM, which aligns with BIM's growing relevance in civil engineering, but also marks a significant supplement to previous methods that relied on CAD drawings. Second, a two-stage generation framework incorporating generative AI (TGAI), inspired by the human drawing process, is designed to simplify the complexity of the design problem. Third, for the AI model in TGAI, this paper pioneers to fuse physical conditions into diffusion models (DMs) to build a novel physics-based conditional diffusion model (PCDM). In contrast to conventional DMs, on the one hand, PCDM directly predicts shear wall drawings to focus on similarity, and on the other hand, PCDM effectively fuses cross-domain information, i.e., design drawings, timesteps, and physical conditions, by integrating well-designed attention modules. Additionally, a new evaluation system including objective and subjective measures is designed to evaluate models' performance, complementing the evaluation system in the traditional methods. The quantitative results demonstrate that PCDM significantly surpasses recent SOTA techniques across both measures. The qualitative results highlight PCDM's superior capabilities in generating high-perceptual-quality drawings adhering to essential design criteria. In addition, benefiting from the fusion of physical conditions, PCDM effectively supports diverse and creative designs tailored to building heights and seismic precautionary intensities, showcasing its unique generation and generalization abilities.