CrackESS: A Self-Prompting Crack Segmentation System for Edge Devices

Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a sustainable and essential approach for infrastructure maintenance, enabling the early detection of structural defects. Leveraging computer vision (CV) methods for automated infrastructure monitoring can significantly enhance monitoring efficiency and precision. However, these methods often face challenges in efficiency and accuracy, particularly in complex environments. Recent CNN-based and SAM-based approaches have demonstrated excellent performance in crack segmentation, but their high computational demands limit their applicability on edge devices. This paper introduces CrackESS, a novel system for detecting and segmenting concrete cracks. The approach first utilizes a YOLOv8 model for self-prompting and a LoRA-based fine-tuned SAM model for crack segmentation, followed by refining the segmentation masks through the proposed Crack Mask Refinement Module (CMRM). We conduct experiments on three datasets(Khanhha's dataset, Crack500, CrackCR) and validate CrackESS on a climbing robot system to demonstrate the advantage and effectiveness of our approach.