Automatically detecting or segmenting cracks in images can help in reducing the cost of maintenance or operations. Detecting, measuring and quantifying cracks for distress analysis in challenging background scenarios is a difficult task as there is no clear boundary that separates cracks from the background. Developed algorithms should handle the inherent challenges associated with data. Some of the perceptually noted challenges are color, intensity, depth, blur, motion-blur, orientation, different region of interest (ROI) for the defect, scale, illumination, complex and challenging background, etc. These variations occur across (crack inter class) and within images (crack intra-class variabilities). Overall, there is significant background (inter) and foreground (intra-class) variability. In this work, we have attempted to reduce the effect of these variations in challenging background scenarios. We have proposed a stochastic width (SW) approach to reduce the effect of these variations. Our proposed approach improves detectability and significantly reduces false positives and negatives. We have measured the performance of our algorithm objectively in terms of mean IoU, false positives and negatives and subjectively in terms of perceptual quality.

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