A hybrid attention deep learning network for refined segmentation of cracks from shield tunnel lining images

This research developed a hybrid position-channel network (named PCNet) through incorporating newly designed channel and position attention modules into U-Net to alleviate the crack discontinuity problem in channel and spatial dimensions. In PCNet, the U-Net is used as a baseline to extract informative spatial and channel-wise features from shield tunnel lining crack images. A channel and a position attention module are designed and embedded after each convolution layer of U-Net to model the feature interdependencies in channel and spatial dimensions. These attention modules can make the U-Net adaptively integrate local crack features with their global dependencies. Experiments were conducted utilizing the dataset based on the images from Shanghai metro shield tunnels. The results validate the effectiveness of the designed channel and position attention modules, since they can individually increase balanced accuracy (BA) by 11.25% and 12.95%, intersection over union (IoU) by 10.79% and 11.83%, and F₁ score by 9.96% and 10.63%, respectively. In comparison with the state-of-the-art models (i.e. LinkNet, PSPNet, U-Net, PANet, and Mask R–CNN) on the testing dataset, the proposed PCNet outperforms others with an improvement of BA, IoU, and F₁ score owing to the implementation of the channel and position attention modules. These evaluation metrics indicate that the proposed PCNet presents refined crack segmentation with improved performance and is a practicable approach to segment shield tunnel lining cracks in field practice.