Crack segmentation is crucial for health monitoring and preventive maintenance of concrete structures. However, the complex morphologies of cracks and the limited resources of mobile devices pose challenges for accurate and efficient segmentation. To address this, we propose an efficient dynamic-state-space-enhanced network termed DSS-MobileNetV3 for crack segmentation. The DSS-MobileNetV3 adopts a U-shaped encoder–decoder architecture, and a dynamic-state-space (DSS) block is designed into the encoder to improve the MobileNetV3 bottleneck module in modeling global dependencies. The DSS block improves the MobileNetV3 model in structural perception and global dependency modeling for complex crack morphologies by integrating dynamic snake convolution and a state space model. The decoder utilizes the upsampling and depthwise separable convolution to progressively decode and efficiently restore the spatial resolution. In addition, to suppress complex noise in the image background and highlight crack textures, the strip pooling module is introduced into the skip connection between the encoder and decoder for performance enhancement. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public crack datasets, and the proposed DSS-MobileNetV3 achieves SOTA performance in both accuracy and efficiency.

Cracks are vital warning signs to reflect the structural deterioration in concrete constructions and buildings. However, their diverse and complex morphologies make accurate segmentation challenging. Deep learning-based methods effectively alleviate the low accuracy of traditional methods, while they are limited by the receptive field and computational efficiency, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework termed High-frequency Refined Mamba with Snake Perception Attention module (HFR-Mamba) for more accurate crack segmentation. HFR-Mamba effectively refines Mamba’s global dependency modeling by extracting frequency domain features and the attention mechanism. Specifically, HFR-Mamba consists of the High-frequency Refined Mamba encoder, the Snake Perception Attention (SPA) module, and the Multi-scale Feature Fusion decoder. The encoder uses Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to extract high-frequency texture features and utilizes the Refined Visual State Space (RVSS) module to fuse spatial features and high-frequency components, which effectively refines the global modeling process of Mamba. The SPA module integrates snake convolutions with different directions to filter background noise from the encoder and highlight cracks for the decoder. For the decoder, it adopts a multi-scale feature fusion strategy and a strongly supervised approach to enhance decoding performance. Extensive experiments show HFR-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in IoU, DSC, Recall, Accuracy, and Precision indicators with fewer parameters, validating its effectiveness in crack segmentation.