Yu Song

Yu Song, Zilong Huang, Chuanyue Shen et al.

The standard petrography test method for measuring air voids in concrete (ASTM C457) requires a meticulous and long examination of sample phase composition under a stereomicroscope. The high expertise and specialized equipment discourage this test for routine concrete quality control. Though the task can be alleviated with the aid of color-based image segmentation, additional surface color treatment is required. Recently, deep learning algorithms using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved unprecedented segmentation performance on image testing benchmarks. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using CNN to conduct concrete segmentation without the use of color treatment. The CNN demonstrated a strong potential to process a wide range of concretes, including those not involved in model training. The experimental results showed that CNN outperforms the color-based segmentation by a considerable margin, and has comparable accuracy to human experts. Furthermore, the segmentation time is reduced to mere seconds.

Boya Ouyang, Yuhai Li, Yu Song et al.

Despite enormous efforts over the last decades to establish the relationship between concrete proportioning and strength, a robust knowledge-based model for accurate concrete strength predictions is still lacking. As an alternative to physical or chemical-based models, data-driven machine learning (ML) methods offer a new solution to this problem. Although this approach is promising for handling the complex, non-linear, non-additive relationship between concrete mixture proportions and strength, a major limitation of ML lies in the fact that large datasets are needed for model training. This is a concern as reliable, consistent strength data is rather limited, especially for realistic industrial concretes. Here, based on the analysis of a large dataset (>10,000 observations) of measured compressive strengths from industrially-produced concretes, we compare the ability of select ML algorithms to "learn" how to reliably predict concrete strength as a function of the size of the dataset. Based on these results, we discuss the competition between how accurate a given model can eventually be (when trained on a large dataset) and how much data is actually required to train this model.