Super-Resolution Reconstruction Method of Pavement Crack Images Based on an Improved Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

A super-resolution reconstruction approach based on an improved generative adversarial network is presented to overcome the huge disparities in image quality due to variable equipment and illumination conditions in the image-collecting stage of intelligent pavement detection. The nonlinear network of the generator is first improved, and the Residual Dense Block (RDB) is created to serve as Batch Normalization (BN). The Attention Module is then formed by combining the RDB, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Conv Layer. Finally, a loss function based on the L1 norm is utilized to replace the original loss function. The experimental findings demonstrate that the self-built pavement crack dataset’s Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) of the reconstructed images reach 29.21 dB and 0.854, respectively. The results improved compared to the Set5, Set14, and BSD100 datasets. Additionally, by employing Faster-RCNN and a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), the effects of image reconstruction on detection and segmentation are confirmed. The findings indicate that the segmentation results’ F1 is enhanced by 0.012 to 0.737 and the detection results’ confidence is increased by 0.031 to 0.9102 when compared to state-of-the-art methods. It has a significant engineering application value and can successfully increase pavement crack-detecting accuracy.