Imbalance-Aware Culvert-Sewer Defect Segmentation Using an Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network
It addresses a critical issue in infrastructure inspection by improving segmentation accuracy for underrepresented classes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing feature pyramid networks.
This paper tackles the problem of semantic segmentation for culvert-sewer defects in imbalanced datasets by introducing the Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN), which achieves an average IoU improvement of 13.8% on a culvert-sewer dataset and 27.2% on a benchmark drone dataset.
Imbalanced datasets are a significant challenge in real-world scenarios. They lead to models that underperform on underrepresented classes, which is a critical issue in infrastructure inspection. This paper introduces the Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN), a deep learning model for the semantic segmentation of culverts and sewer pipes within imbalanced datasets. The E-FPN incorporates architectural innovations like sparsely connected blocks and depth-wise separable convolutions to improve feature extraction and handle object variations. To address dataset imbalance, the model employs strategies like class decomposition and data augmentation. Experimental results on the culvert-sewer defects dataset and a benchmark aerial semantic segmentation drone dataset show that the E-FPN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average Intersection over Union (IoU) improvement of 13.8% and 27.2%, respectively. Additionally, class decomposition and data augmentation together boost the model's performance by approximately 6.9% IoU. The proposed E-FPN presents a promising solution for enhancing object segmentation in challenging, multi-class real-world datasets, with potential applications extending beyond culvert-sewer defect detection.