Modified Crack Detection of Sewer Conduit with Low-Resolution Images

Imaging devices of less than 300,000 pixels are mostly used for sewage conduit exploration due to the petty nature of the survey industry in Korea. Particularly, devices of less than 100,000 pixels are still widely used, and the environment for image processing is very dim. Since the sewage conduit images covered in this study have a very low resolution (240 × 320 = 76,800 pixels), it is very difficult to detect cracks. Because most of the resolutions of the sewer conduit images are very low in Korea, this problem of low resolution was selected as the subject of this study. Cracks were detected through a total of six steps of improving the crack in Step 2, finding the optimal threshold value in Step 3, and applying an algorithm to detect cracks in Step 5. Cracks were effectively detected by the optimal parameters in Steps 2 and 3 and the user algorithm in Step 5. Despite the very low resolution, the cracked images showed a 96.4% accuracy of detection, and the non-cracked images showed 94.5% accuracy. Moreover, the analysis was excellent in quality. It is believed that the findings of this study can be effectively used for crack detection with low-resolution images.