Journal Article

RCE-GAN: A Rebar Clutter Elimination Network to Improve Tunnel Lining Void Detection from GPR Images

Qu, Chunxu, Tang, Yu, Yang, Donghui, Geng, Tiesuo, Wang, Yuanzheng, Qin, Hui, Zhang, Donghao

2022

Overview

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the most recommended tools for routine inspection of tunnel linings. However, the rebars in the reinforced concrete produce a strong shielding effect on the electromagnetic waves, which may hinder the interpretation of GPR data. In this work, we proposed a method to improve the identification of tunnel lining voids by designing a generative adversarial network-based rebar clutter elimination network (RCE-GAN). The designed network has two sets of generators and discriminators, and by introducing the cycle-consistency loss, the network is capable of learning high-level features between unpaired GPR images. In addition, an attention module and a dilation center part were designed in the network to improve the network performance. Validation of the proposed method was conducted on both synthetic and real-world GPR images, collected from the implementation of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations and a controlled physical model experiment, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is promising for its lower demand on the training dataset and the improvement in the identification of tunnel lining voids.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Accuracy / Clutter / Concrete / data collection / Deep learning / design / Discriminators / Efficiency / Electromagnetic radiation / Electromagnetic shielding / Generative adversarial networks / generative adversarial networks (GAN) / Generators / Ground penetrating radar / ground penetrating radar (GPR) / image analysis / Inspection / learning / Methods / Noise / physical models / Radar imaging / Rebar / rebar clutter elimination / Reinforced concrete / Remote sensing / Signal processing / Signatures / Tunnel linings / tunnel void / unsupervised learning