Automatic Detection Method of Sewer Pipe Defects Using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract

Regular inspection of sewer pipes can detect serious defects in time, which is significant to ensure the healthy operation of sewer systems and urban safety. Currently, the widely used closed-circuit television (CCTV) inspection system relies mainly on manual assessment, which is labor intensive and inefficient. Therefore, it is urgent to develop an efficient and accurate automatic defect detection method. In this paper, an improved method based on YOLOv4 is proposed for the detection of sewer defects. A significant improvement of this method is using the spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) module to expand the receptive field and improve the ability of the model to fuse context features in different receptive fields. Meanwhile, the influence of three bounding box loss functions on model performance are compared based on their processing speed and detection accuracy, and the effectiveness of the combination of DIoU loss function and SPP module is verified. In addition, to address the lack of datasets for sewer defect detection, a dataset that contains 2700 images and 4 types of defects was created, which provides useful help for the application of computer vision techniques in this field. Experimental results show that, compared with the YOLOv4 model, the mean average precision (mAP) of the improved model for sewer defect detection are improved by 4.6%, the mAP can reach 92.3% and the recall can reach 89.0%. The improved model can effectively improve the detection and classification accuracy of sewer defects, and has significant advantages compared with other methods.

YOLOv5-Sewer: Lightweight Sewer Defect Detection Model

“…YOLOv5s is a lightweight model within the YOLOv5 framework. Many studies on sewer defect detection are based on YOLOv5 [2,17,[20][21][22]. This paper introduces a novel and lightweight sewer defect detection model named YOLOv5-Sewer, based on the improved YOLOv5s, specifically designed for the recognition of eight types of defects commonly found in sewer systems.…”

“…Nevertheless, the extended duration of these inspections can result in visual fatigue, thereby compromising the accuracy of defect identification. Consequently, the utilization of automatic detection methods has been recognized as an effective solution [1][2][3][4][5]. Numerous methodologies for the detection of defects in sewer systems have been proposed by researchers.…”

A Simulation-Based Approach to Evaluate the Performance of Automated Surveillance Camera Systems for Smart Cities

“…Therefore, an accurate and automated detection method is necessary. In a previous study [28], the authors suggested the utilization of YOLOv4 with the SPP module and the DIoU loss function to enhance detection and classification accuracy.…”