Each year, millions of dollars are invested on road maintenance and reparation all over the world. In order to minimize costs, one of the main aspects is the early detection of those flaws. Different types of cracks require different types of repairs; therefore, not only a crack detection is required but a crack type classification. Also, the earlier the crack is detected, the cheaper the reparation is. Once the images are captured, several processes are applied in order to extract the main characteristics for emphasizing the cracks (logarithmic transformation, bilateral filter, Canny algorithm, and a morphological filter). After image preprocessing, a decision tree heuristic algorithm is applied to finally classify the image. This work obtained an average of 88% of success detecting cracks and an 80% of success detecting the type of the crack. It could be implemented in a vehicle traveling as fast as 130 kmh or 81 mph.

The maintenance of road pavements is an essential task to prevent major deterioration and to reduce accident rates. In this task, the detection and classification of different types of cracks on the roads is usually considered. However, in most cases, these tasks are not fully automated and they need to be supervised by an expert to make repair decisions. This work focuses on the automatic classification of the most common types of cracks: longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, and alligator cracks. Our proposal combines, first, computer vision techniques for crack segmentation and second, an ensemble model (composed of different rule‐based algorithms) for the classification. This approach achieves an average precision and recall values greater than 94% for three analyzed data sets improving the results in comparison to other approaches.

Tumor segmentation in Computed Tomography (CT) images is a crucial step in image-guided surgery. However, low-contrast CT images impede the performance of subsequent segmentation tasks. Contrast enhancement is then used as a preprocessing step to highlight the relevant structures, thus facilitating not only medical diagnosis but also image segmentation with higher accuracy. In this paper, we propose a goal-oriented contrast enhancement method to improve tumor segmentation performance. The proposed method is based on two concepts, namely guided image enhancement and image quality control through an optimization scheme. The proposed OPTimized Guided Contrast Enhancement (OPTGCE) scheme exploits both contextual information from the guidance image and structural information from the input image in a two-step process. The first step consists of applying a two-dimensional histogram specification exploiting contextual information in the corresponding guidance image, i.e. Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI). In the second step, an optimization scheme using a structural similarity measure to preserve the structural information of the original image is performed. To the best of our knowledge, this kind of contrast enhancement optimization scheme using cross-modal guidance is proposed for the first time in the medical imaging context. The experimental results obtained on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in terms of enhancement and segmentation quality in comparison to some state-of-the-art methods based on the histogram.