Ceramic Cracks Segmentation with Deep Learning

Abstract

Cracks are pathologies whose appearance in ceramic tiles can cause various damages due to the coating system losing water tightness and impermeability functions. Besides, the detachment of a ceramic plate, exposing the building structure, can still reach people who move around the building. Manual inspection is the most common method for addressing this problem. However, it depends on the knowledge and experience of those who perform the analysis and demands a long time and a high cost to map the entire area. This work focuses on automated optical inspection to find faults in ceramic tiles performing the segmentation of cracks in ceramic images using deep learning to segment these defects. We propose an architecture for segmenting cracks in facades with Deep Learning that includes an image pre-processing step. We also propose the Ceramic Crack Database, a set of images to segment defects in ceramic tiles. The proposed model can adequately identify the crack even when it is close to or within the grout.