Towards Robotic Marble Resin Application: Crack Detection on Marble Using Deep Learning

Cracks can occur on different surfaces such as buildings, roads, aircrafts, etc. The manual inspection of cracks is time-consuming and prone to human error. Machine vision has been used for decades to detect defects in materials in production lines. However, the detection or segmentation of cracks on a randomly textured surface, such as marble, has not been sufficiently investigated. This work provides an up-to-date systematic and exhaustive study on marble crack segmentation with color images based on deep learning (DL) techniques. The authors conducted a performance evaluation of 112 DL segmentation models with red–green–blue (RGB) marble slab images using five-fold cross-validation, providing consistent evaluation metrics in terms of Intersection over Union (IoU), precision, recall and F1 score to identify the segmentation challenges related to marble cracks’ physiology. Comparative results reveal the FPN model as the most efficient architecture, scoring 71.35% mean IoU, and SE-ResNet as the most effective feature extraction network family. The results indicate the importance of selecting the appropriate Loss function and backbone network, underline the challenges related to the marble crack segmentation problem, and pose an important step towards the robotic automation of crack segmentation and simultaneous resin application to heal cracks in marble-processing plants.