Distribution-aware Noisy-label Crack Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel distribution-aware joint learning framework that enhances crack segmentation performance and robustness against noisy labels by integrating the Segment Anything Model with domain-specific knowledge, achieving superior results and cross-domain generalization.

Contribution

It introduces the SAM-Adapter with a distribution-aware framework to mitigate noisy labels, improving generalization in crack segmentation tasks.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on public datasets

Demonstrates high cross-domain generalization on unseen data

Effectively reduces the impact of noisy labels during training

Abstract

Road crack segmentation is critical for robotic systems tasked with the inspection, maintenance, and monitoring of road infrastructures. Existing deep learning-based methods for crack segmentation are typically trained on specific datasets, which can lead to significant performance degradation when applied to unseen real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce the SAM-Adapter, which incorporates the general knowledge of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into crack segmentation, demonstrating enhanced performance and generalization capabilities. However, the effectiveness of the SAM-Adapter is constrained by noisy labels within small-scale training sets, including omissions and mislabeling of cracks. In this paper, we present an innovative joint learning framework that utilizes distribution-aware domain-specific semantic knowledge to guide the discriminative learning process of the SAM-Adapter. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that effectively minimizes the adverse effects of noisy labels on the supervised learning of the SAM-Adapter. Our experimental results on two public pavement crack segmentation datasets confirm that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, evaluations on the completely unseen CFD dataset demonstrate the high cross-domain generalization capability of our model, underscoring its potential for practical applications in crack segmentation.