Pixel-Level Pavement Distress Assessment Using Instance Segmentation

Automated pavement distress assessment requires more than image-level classification or coarse bounding box detection, demanding precise localization of thin, branching, and irregular cracks to achieve the geometric precision necessary for maintenance-relevant quantification. This paper presents a vision-based pavement distress analysis system based on Mask R-CNN instance segmentation and evaluates it on UWGB-StreetCrack, a custom field-collected roadway image dataset acquired with a vehicle-mounted smartphone and manually annotated with polygon labels for longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. Five Detectron2-based Mask R-CNN backbone variants were considered under a consistent fine-tuning protocol. The best-performing model, Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-101 FPN backbone, achieved 84.23% precision, 90.04% recall, and an F1 score of 87.04% under the project-specific bounding-box matching protocol. The same model produced an aggregate predicted crack-area fraction of 2.164%, closely matching the 2.170% ground-truth crack-area fraction. To contextualize the segmentation system against a detector-oriented alternative, a CSPDarknet53-based YOLO detector was also adapted and retrained on the dataset, reaching 27.5% precision and 20.7% recall on the validation protocol. The results show that instance segmentation is a practical direction for field pavement imagery and aggregate crack-area estimation, while also exposing open challenges in annotation consistency, class imbalance, confounder rejection, and mask-level benchmarking.

Towards an LSTM-based Predictive Framework for Literature-based Knowledge Discovery

Literature-based knowledge discovery process identifies the important but implicit relations among information embedded in published literature. Existing techniques from Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing attempt to identify the hidden or unpublished connections between information concepts within published literature, however, these techniques undermine the concept of predicting the future and emerging relations among scientific knowledge components encapsulated within the literature. Keyword Co-occurrence Network (KCN), built upon author selected keywords (i.e., knowledge entities), is considered as a knowledge graph that focuses both on these knowledge components and knowledge structure of a scientific domain by examining the relationships between knowledge entities. Using data from two multidisciplinary research domains other than the medical domain, capitalizing on bibliometrics, the dynamicity of temporal KCNs, and a Long Short Term Memory recurrent neural network, this study proposed a framework to successfully predict the future literature-based discoveries - the emerging connections among knowledge units. Framing the problem as a dynamic supervised link prediction task, the proposed framework integrates some novel node and edge-level features. Temporal importance of keywords computed from both bipartite and unipartite networks, communities of keywords, built upon genealogical relations, and relative importance of temporal citation counts used in the feature construction process. Both node and edge-level features were input into an LSTM network to forecast the feature values for positive and negatively labeled non-connected keyword pairs and classify them accurately. High classification performance rates suggest that these features are supportive both in predicting the emerging connections between scientific knowledge units and emerging trend analysis.