Crack detection based on ResNet with spatial attention

Deep Convolution neural network (DCNN) has been widely used in the healthy maintenance of civil infrastructure. Using DCNN to improve crack detection performance has attracted many researchers' attention. In this paper, a light-weight spatial attention network module is proposed to strengthen the representation capability of ResNet and improve the crack detection performance. It utilizes attention mechanism to strengthen the interested objects in global receptive field of ResNet convolution layers. Global average spatial information over all channels are used to construct an attention scalar. The scalar is combined with adaptive weighted sigmoid function to activate the output of each channel's feature maps. Salient objects in feature maps are refined by the attention scalar. The proposed spatial attention module is stacked in ResNet50 to detect crack. Experiments results show that the proposed module can got significant performance improvement in crack detection.