A machine vision-based intelligent segmentation method for dam underwater cracks using swarm optimization algorithm and deep learning

Ensuring the safety of water networks is a research hotspot in the current water conservancy industry, and dams are an important part. However, over time, the dam is prone to varying degrees of aging and disease, most of which are structural cracks. If they cannot be discovered and repaired in time, the normal operation of the dam will be affected, and even catastrophic accidents such as dam failure will occur. However, complex backgrounds and blurred images can easily lead to misjudgments by machine vision detection models, and high-efficiency and accurate detection and evaluation technology are urgently needed. This paper combines the deep semantic segmentation network and the model hyperparameters optimization algorithm to propose a data-intelligent perception method of dam underwater cracks driven by knowledge coupling. Taking the underwater detection of a concrete face rockfill dam as an example, the effectiveness of the model is verified by using the underwater vehicle as the carrier. Experimental results indicate that the developed method achieves an intersection-union ratio of 0.9301, a precision rate of 0.9678, a precision rate of 0.9472, and a recall rate of 0.9577 in the test set. This shows that the constructed method has a high crack fine detection performance. In addition, the developed method has better segmentation performance in different complex underwater crack scenes, which further illustrates the high performance of the developed method.