Mobile-DenseNet: Detection of building concrete surface cracks using a new fusion technique based on deep learning

Crack detection is very important during the inspection of building structures to determine whether they are safe. Therefore, to ensure the reliability and longevity of buildings, it is necessary to have experts periodically carry out building inspections. Building inspection has traditionally been conducted using human-based visual inspection methods as well as artificial intelligence methods that have shown great success in computer vision in recent years. In this study, 9 different models (Xception, VGG16, ResNet101, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, MobileNetV2, DenseNet169, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNetB6), which have shown significant success in the field of artificial intelligence, are discussed to detect and classify cracks in building structures. In addition, a new fusion model structure called Mobile-DenseNet has been proposed by making block cutting and adding auxiliary layers to the MobileNetV2 and DenseNet169 model structures. With this proposed model structure, cracks in concrete structures were classified. A dataset consisting of concrete surface images was used to detect and classify cracks occurring in concrete structures, and a 99.87 % success rate was achieved with the proposed Mobile-DenseNet model in classifying cracks occurring on the concrete surface. The proposed model outperformed the traditional pretrained model structures in the study in terms of the number of transactions, density, features, complexity, and success accuracy.