Automated pavement crack detection and measurement are important road issues. Agencies have to guarantee the improvement of road safety. Conventional crack detection and measurement algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and low efficiency. Therefore, recently, innovative algorithms have received increased attention from researchers. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (without a pooling layer) based on probability fusion for automated pavement crack detection and measurement. Specifically, an ensemble of convolutional neural networks was employed to identify the structure of small cracks with raw images. Secondly, outputs of the individual convolutional neural network model for the ensemble were averaged to produce the final crack probability value of each pixel, which can obtain a predicted probability map. Finally, the predicted morphological features of the cracks were measured by using the skeleton extraction algorithm. To validate the proposed method, some experiments were performed on two public crack databases (CFD and AigleRN) and the results of the different state-of-the-art methods were compared. To evaluate the efficiency of crack detection methods, three parameters were considered: precision (Pr), recall (Re) and F1 score (F1). For the two public databases of pavement images, the proposed method obtained the highest values of the three evaluation parameters: for the CFD database, Pr = 0.9552, Re = 0.9521 and F1 = 0.9533 (which reach values up to 0.5175 higher than the values obtained on the same database with the other methods), for the AigleRN database, Pr = 0.9302, Re = 0.9166 and F1 = 0.9238 (which reach values up to 0.7313 higher than the values obtained on the same database with the other methods). The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods. For crack measurement, the crack length and width can be measure based on different crack types (complex, common, thin, and intersecting cracks.). The results show that the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied for crack measurement.

The accurate retinal vessel segmentation (RVS) is of great significance to assist doctors in the diagnosis of ophthalmology diseases and other systemic diseases. Manually designing a valid neural network architecture for retinal vessel segmentation requires high expertise and a large workload. In order to improve the performance of vessel segmentation and reduce the workload of manually designing neural network, we propose novel approach which applies neural architecture search (NAS) to optimize an encoder-decoder architecture for retinal vessel segmentation. A modified evolutionary algorithm is used to evolve the architectures of encoder-decoder framework with limited computing resources. The evolved model obtained by the proposed approach achieves top performance among all compared methods on the three datasets, namely DRIVE, STARE and CHASE_DB1, but with much fewer parameters. Moreover, the results of cross-training show that the evolved model is with considerable scalability, which indicates a great potential for clinical disease diagnosis.

Retinal vessel segmentation is a crucial step in diagnosing and screening various diseases, including diabetes, ophthalmologic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for vessel segmentation in color fundus images using encoder-decoder based octave convolution networks. Compared with other convolution networks utilizing standard convolution for feature extraction, the proposed method utilizes octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions for learning multiple-spatial-frequency features, thus can better capture retinal vasculatures with varying sizes and shapes. To provide the network the capability of learning how to decode multifrequency features, we extend octave convolution and propose a new operation named octave transposed convolution. A novel architecture of convolutional neural network, named as Octave UNet integrating both octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions is proposed based on the encoder-decoder architecture of UNet, which can generate high resolution vessel segmentation in one single forward feeding without post-processing steps. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Octave UNet outperforms the baseline UNet achieving better or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods with fast processing speed. Specifically, the proposed method achieves 0.9664 / 0.9713 / 0.9759 / 0.9698 accuracy, 0.8374 / 0.8664 / 0.8670 / 0.8076 sensitivity, 0.9790 / 0.9798 / 0.9840 / 0.9831 specificity, 0.8127 / 0.8191 / 0.8313 / 0.7963 F1 score, and 0.9835 / 0.9875 / 0.9905 / 0.9845 Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, on DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF datasets, respectively.