Advancements in image processing and deep learning offer considerable opportunities for automated defect assessment in civil structures. However, these systems cannot work interactively with human inspectors. Mixed reality (MR) can be adopted to address this by involving inspectors in various stages of the assessment process. This paper integrates You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5n and YOLO v5m with the Canny algorithm for real-time concrete crack detection and skeleton extraction with a Microsoft HoloLens 2 MR device. The YOLO v5n demonstrates a superior mean average precision (mAP) 0.5 and speed, while YOLO v5m achieves the highest mAP 0.5 0.95 among the other YOLO v5 structures. The Canny algorithm also outperforms the Sobel and Prewitt edge detectors with the highest F1 score. The developed MR-based system could not only be employed for real-time defect assessment but also be utilized for the automatic recording of the location and other specifications of the cracks for further analysis and future re-inspections.
Accurate underground utility mapping remains a critical yet complex task in Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) interpretation, essential to avoiding costly and dangerous excavation errors. This study presents a novel deep learning-based pipeline for 3D reconstruction of buried linear utilities from high-resolution GPR B-scan data. Three state-of-the-art models—YOLOv8, YOLOv11, and Mask R-CNN—were employed for both bounding box and keypoint detection of hyperbolic reflections, using a real-world GPR dataset. On the test set, Mask R-CNN achieved the highest keypoint F1-score (0.822) and bounding box F1-score (0.867), outperforming the YOLO models. Detected summit points were clustered using a 3D DBSCAN algorithm to approximate the spatial trajectories of buried utilities. RANSAC-based line fitting was then applied to each cluster, yielding an average RMSE of 0.06 across all fitted 3D paths. The key innovation of this hybrid model lies in its use of real-world data (avoiding synthetic augmentation), direct summit point detection (beyond bounding box analysis), and a geometric 3D reconstruction pipeline. This approach addresses key limitations in prior studies, including poor generalizability to complex real-world scenarios and the reliance on full 3D data volumes. Our method offers a more practical and scalable solution for subsurface utility mapping in real-world settings.