Monitoring surface cracks in infrastructure is crucial for structural health monitoring. Automatic visual inspection offers an effective solution, especially in hard-to-reach areas. Machine learning approaches have proven their effectiveness but typically require large annotated datasets for supervised training. Once a crack is detected, monitoring its severity often demands precise segmentation of the damage. However, pixel-level annotation of images for segmentation is labor-intensive. To mitigate this cost, one can leverage explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to derive segmentations from the explanations of a classifier, requiring only weak image-level supervision. This paper proposes applying this methodology to segment and monitor surface cracks. We evaluate the performance of various XAI methods and examine how this approach facilitates severity quantification and growth monitoring. Results reveal that while the resulting segmentation masks may exhibit lower quality than those produced by supervised methods, they remain meaningful and enable severity monitoring, thus reducing substantial labeling costs.

本文提出了运用可解释人工智能的方法对表面裂纹进行分割和监测，结果表明，虽然生成的分割掩码质量可能不如有监督方法产生的高，但仍具有意义并能够实现严重程度的监测，从而降低了大量标注成本。

从分类到分割的可解释人工智能研究: 裂缝检测和生长监测