Fast and Accurately Measuring Crack Width via Cascade Principal Component Analysis

Lijuan Duan, Huiling Geng, Jun Zeng, Junbiao Pang, Qingming Huang

Abstract: Crack width is an important indicator to diagnose the safety of constructions, e.g., asphalt road, concrete bridge. In practice, measuring crack width is a challenge task: (1) the irregular and non-smooth boundary makes the traditional method inefficient; (2) pixel-wise measurement guarantees the accuracy of a system and (3) understanding the damage of constructions from any pre-selected points is a mandatary requirement. To address these problems, we propose a cascade Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to efficiently measure crack width from images. Firstly, the binary crack image is obtained to describe the crack via the off-the-shelf crack detection algorithms. Secondly, given a pre-selected point, PCA is used to find the main axis of a crack. Thirdly, Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) is proposed to compute the main axis of a crack with a irregular boundary. We evaluate the proposed method on a real data set. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performances in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.