Fine-tune vision foundation model for crack segmentation in civil infrastructures

Large-scale foundation models have become the mainstream method in the field of deep learning, while in civil engineering, the scale of AI models is strictly limited. In this work, vision foundation model is introduced for crack segmentation. Two Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, adapter and low-rank adaptation, are adopted to fine-tune the foundation model in the field of semantic segmentation: Segment Anything Model (SAM). The fine-tuned model CrackSAM is much larger than all the existing crack segmentation models, but shows excellent performance. To test the zero-shot performance of the proposed method, two unique datasets related to road and exterior wall cracks are collected, annotated and open-sourced, in total 810 images. Comparative experiments are conducted with twelve mature semantic segmentation models. On datasets with artificial noise and previously unseen datasets, the performance of CrackSAM far exceeds that of all state-of-the-art models. CrackSAM exhibits remarkable superiority, particularly in challenging conditions such as dim lighting, shadows, road markings, construction joints, and other interference factors. Such cross-scenario results demonstrate the outstanding zero-shot capability of foundation models, and provide new ideas for the development of vision models in civil engineering.