Vision-Based Defect Inspection for Sewer Pipes: Comparison
Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Peter Tang and Version 1 by Hanxiang Wang.

Underground sewerage systems (USSs) are a vital part of public infrastructure that contributes to collecting wastewater or stormwater from various sources and conveying it to storage tanks or sewer treatment facilities. A healthy USS with proper functionality can effectively prevent urban waterlogging and play a positive role in the sustainable development of water resources. Since it was first introduced in the 1960s, computer vision (CV) has become a mature technology that is used to realize promising automation for sewer inspections.

  • survey
  • computer vision
  • defect inspection
  • condition assessment
  • sewer pipes

1. Introduction

1.1. Background

Underground sewerage systems (USSs) are a vital part of public infrastructure that contributes to collecting wastewater or stormwater from various sources and conveying it to storage tanks or sewer treatment facilities. A healthy USS with proper functionality can effectively prevent urban waterlogging and play a positive role in the sustainable development of water resources. However, sewer defects caused by different influence factors such as age and material directly affect the degradation of pipeline conditions. It was reported in previous studies that the conditions of USSs in some places are unsatisfactory and deteriorate over time. For example, a considerable proportion (20.8%) of Canadian sewers is graded as poor and very poor. The rehabilitation of these USSs is needed in the following decade in order to ensure normal operations and services on a continuing basis [1]. Currently, the maintenance and management of USSs have become challenging problems for municipalities worldwide due to the huge economic costs [2]. In 2019, a report in the United States of America (USA) estimated that utilities spent more than USD 3 billion on wastewater pipe replacements and repairs, which addressed 4692 miles of pipeline [3].

1.2. Defect Inspection Framework

Since it was first introduced in the 1960s [4], computer vision (CV) has become a mature technology that is used to realize promising automation for sewer inspections. In order to meet the increasing demands on USSs, a CV-based defect inspection system is required to identify, locate, or segment the varied defects prior to the rehabilitation process. As illustrated in Figure 1, an efficient defect inspection framework for underground sewer pipelines should cover five stages. In the data acquisition stage, there are many available techniques such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), sewer scanner and evaluation technology (SSET), and totally integrated sonar and camera systems (TISCITs) [5]. CCTV-based inspections rely on a remotely controlled tractor or robot with a mounted CCTV camera [6]. An SSET is a type of method that acquires the scanned data from a suite of sensor devices [7]. The TISCIT system utilizes sonar and CCTV cameras to obtain a 360° view of the sewer conditions [5]. As mentioned in several studies [6,8,9[6][8][9][10],10], CCTV-based inspections are the most widely used methods due to the advantages of economics, safety, and simplicity. Nevertheless, the performance of CCTV-based inspections is limited by the quality of the acquired data. Therefore, image-based learning methods require pre-processing algorithms to remove noise and enhance the resolution of the collected images. Many studies on sewer inspections have recently applied image pre-processing before examining the defects [11,12,13][11][12][13].
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Figure 1. There are five stages in the defect inspection framework, which include (a) the data acquisition stage based on various sensors (CCTV, sonar, or scanner), (b) the data processing stage for the collected data, (c) the defect inspection stage containing different algorithms (defect classification, detection, and segmentation), (d) the risk assessment for detected defects using image post-processing, and (e) the final report generation stage for the condition evaluation.

2. Defect Inspection

In this section, several classic algorithms are illustrated, and the research tendency is analyzed. Figure 2 provides a brief description of the algorithms in each category.  In order to comprehensively analyze these studies, the publication time, title, utilized methodology, advantages, and disadvantages for each study are covered. Moreover, the specific proportion of each inspection algorithm is computed in Figure 3. It is clear that the defect classification accounts for the most significant percentages in all the investigated studies.
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Figure 2.
The classification map of the existing algorithms for each category. The dotted boxes represent the main stages of the algorithms.
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Figure 3.
Proportions of the investigated studies using different inspection algorithms.

2.1. Defect Classification

Due to the recent advancements in ML, both the scientific community and industry have attempted to apply ML-based pattern recognition in various areas, such as agriculture [32][14], resource management [33][15], and construction [34][16]. At present, many types of defect classification algorithms have been presented for both binary and multi-class classification tasks.

2.2. Defect Detection

Rather than the classification algorithms that merely offer each defect a class type, object detection is conducted to locate and classify the objects among the predefined classes using rectangular bounding boxes (BBs) as well as confidence scores (CSs). In recent studies, object detection technology has been increasingly applied in several fields, such as intelligent transportation [75[17][18][19],76,77], smart agriculture [78[20][21][22],79,80], and autonomous construction [81,82,83][23][24][25]. The generic object detection consists of the one-stage approaches and the two-stage approaches. The classic one-stage detectors based on regression include YOLO [84][26], SSD [85][27], CornerNet [86][28], and RetinaNet [87][29]. The two-stage detectors are based on region proposals, including Fast R-CNN [88][30], Faster R-CNN [89][31], and R-FCN [90][32].

2.3. Defect Segmentation

Defect segmentation algorithms can predict defect categories and pixel-level location information with exact shapes, which is becoming increasingly significant for the research on sewer condition assessment by re-coding the exact defect attributes and analyzing the specific severity of each defect. The previous segmentation methods were mainly based on mathematical morphology [112,113][33][34]. However, the morphology segmentation approaches were inefficient compared to the DL-based segmentation methods. As a result, the defect segmentation methods based on DL have been recently explored in various fields.

3. Dataset and Evaluation Metric

The performances of all the algorithms were tested and are reported based on a specific dataset using specific metrics. As a result, datasets and protocols were two primary determining factors in the algorithm evaluation process. The evaluation results are not convincing if the dataset is not representative, or the used metric is poor. It is challenging to judge what method is the SOTA because the existing methods in sewer inspections utilize different datasets and protocols. Therefore, benchmark datasets and standard evaluation protocols are necessary to be provided for future studies.

3.1. Dataset

3.1.1. Dataset Collection

Currently, many data collection robotic systems have emerged that are capable of assisting workers with sewer inspection and spot repair. Table 1 lists the latest advanced robots along with their respective information, including the robot’s name, company, pipe diameter, camera feature, country, and main strong points. Figure 4 introduces several representative robots that are widely utilized to acquire images or videos from underground infrastructures. As shown in Figure 4a, LETS 6.0 is a versatile and powerful inspection system that can be quickly set up to operate in 150 mm or larger pipes. A representative work (Robocam 6) of the Korean company TAP Electronics is shown in Figure 4b. Robocam 6 is the best model to increase the inspection performance without the considerable cost of replacing the equipment. Figure 4c is the X5-HS robot that was developed in China, which is a typical robotic crawler with a high-definition camera. In Figure 4d, Robocam 3000, sold by Japan, is the only large-scale system that is specially devised for inspecting pipes ranging from 250 mm to 3000 mm. It used to be unrealistic to apply the crawler in huge pipelines in Korea.
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Figure 4.
Representative inspection robots for data acquisition. (
a
) LETS 6.0, (
b
) Robocam 6, (
c
) X5-HS, and (
d
) Robocam 3000.
Table 1.
The detailed information of the latest robots for sewer inspection.

Name

Company

Pipe Diameter

Camera Feature

Table 3.
Overview of the evaluation metrics in the recent studies.

Metric

Description

Country

Strong Point

Ref.

Ref.

Accuracy (%)

Processing Speed

CAM160 (https://goolnk.com/YrYQob accessed on 20 February 2022)

Sewer Robotics

200–500 mm

NA

1

USA

● Auto horizon adjustment

● Intensity adjustable LED lighting

● Multifunctional

Broken, crack, deposit, fracture, hole, root, tap

NA

NA

4056

Canada

[9]

LETS 6.0 (https://ariesindustries.com/products/ accessed on 20 February 2022)

2

ARIES INDUSTRIES

Connection, crack, debris, deposit, infiltration, material change, normal, root

150 mm or larger

Precision

The proportion of positive samples in all positive prediction samples

[9]

Recall

1440 × 720–320 × 256

Self-leveling lateral camera or a Pan and tilt camera

RedZone®

Solo CCTV crawler

USA

The proportion of positive prediction samples in all positive samples

[48]

● Slim tractor profile

● Superior lateral camera

● Simultaneously acquire mainline and lateral videos

[

12,000

USA

[48]

[36]

36]

AUPR: 6.8

NA

[48]

[36]

wolverine® 2.02

3

ARIES INDUSTRIES

Attached deposit, defective connection, displaced joint, fissure, infiltration, ingress, intruding connection, porous, root, sealing, settled deposit, surface

3

150–450 mm

NA

USA

Dataset 1: 2 classes

1040 × 1040

● Powerful crawler to maneuver obstacles

Two-level hierarchical CNNs

Front-facing and back-facing camera with a 185∘ wide lens

Classification

2,202,582

Accuracy: 94.5

Precision: 96.84

Recall: 92

● Minimum set uptime

● Camera with lens cleaning technique

F1-score: 94.36

The Netherlands

[49]

1.109 h for 200 videos[37]

[69]

[38]

X5-HS (https://goolnk.com/Rym02W accessed on 20 February 2022)

EASY-SIGHT

4

300–3000 mm

≥2 million pixels

Dataset 1: defective, normal

NA

Dataset 2: 6 classes

China

NA

Accuracy: 94.96

Precision: 85.13

Recall: 84.61

40,000

● High-definition

● Freely choose wireless and wired connection and control

● Display and save videos in real time

F1-score: 84.86

China

[69]

4

8 classes

Deep CNN

Classification

Accuracy: 64.8

NA

[70]

[39]

True accuracy

The proportion of all predictions excluding the missed defective images among the entire actual images

[58]

[65]

AUROC

5

6 classes

CNN

Classification

Accuracy: 96.58

NA

[71]

[41]

Area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve

6

[49]

[37]

8 classes

CNN

Classification

Accuracy: 97.6

0.15 s/image

[52]

[42]

AUPR

7

Area under the precision-recall curve

7 classes

[49]

[37]

Multi-class random forest

Classification

Accuracy: 71

25 FPS

[66]

[43]

mAP

mAP first calculates the average precision values for different recall values for one class, and then takes the average of all classes

8

[9]

7 classes

SVM

Classification

Accuracy: 84.1

NA

[41]

[40

Detection rate

The ratio of the number of the detected defects to total number of defects

[106]

[57]

Error rate

The ratio of the number of mistakenly detected defects to the number of non-defects

[106]

[57]

PA

Pixel accuracy calculating the overall accuracy of all pixels in the image

[116]

[48]

[

48

]

1

3 classes

Multiple binary CNNs

Classification

Accuracy: 86.2

Precision: 87.7

Recall: 90.6

NA

[48]

[36]

]

mPA

The average of pixel accuracy for all categories

[116]

mIoU

The ratio of intersection and union between predictions and GTs

[116]

[48]

fwIoU

Frequency-weighted IoU measuring the mean IoU value weighing the pixel frequency of each class

[116]

[48]

Table 4.
Performances of different algorithms in terms of different evaluation metrics.

ID

Number of Images

Algorithm

Task

Performance

2

12 classes

Single CNN

Classification

AUROC: 87.1

Accuracy

The proportion of correct prediction in all prediction samples

[48]

[36]

[

38

]

Robocam 6 (https://goolnk.com/43pdGA accessed on 20 February 2022)

TAP Electronics

600 mm or more

Sony 130-megapixel Exmor 1/3-inch CMOS

Korea

● High-resolution

● All-in-one subtitle system

RoboCam Innovation4

TAP Electronics

600 mm or more

Sony 130-megapixel Exmor 1/3-inch CMOS

Korea

● Best digital record performance

● Super white LED lighting

● Cableless

Robocam 30004

TAP Electronics’ Japanese subsidiary

250–3000 mm

Sony 1.3-megapixel Exmor CMOS color

Japan

● Can be utilized in huge pipelines

● Optical 10X zoom performance

3.1.2. Benchmarked Dataset

Open-source sewer defect data is necessary for academia to promote fair comparisons in automatic multi-defect classification tasks. In this survey, a publicly available benchmark dataset called Sewer-ML [125][35] for vision-based defect classification is introduced. The Sewer-ML dataset, acquired from Danish companies, contains 1.3 million images labeled by sewer experts with rich experience. Figure 5 shows some sample images from the Sewer-ML dataset, and each image includes one or more classes of defects. The recorded text in the image was redacted using a Gaussian blur kernel to protect private information. Besides, the detailed information of the datasets used in recent papers is described in Table 2. This paper summarizes 32 datasets from different countries in the world, of which the USA has 12 datasets, accounting for the largest proportion. The largest dataset contains 2,202,582 images, whereas the smallest dataset has only 32 images. Since the images were acquired by various types of equipment, the collected images have varied resolutions ranging from 64 × 64 to 4000 × 46,000.
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Figure 5.
Sample images from the Sewer-ML dataset that has a wide diversity of materials and shapes.
Table 2.
Research datasets for sewer defects in recent studies.

ID

Defect Type

Image Resolution

Equipment

Number of Images

Country

Ref.

Dataset 2: barrier, deposit, disjunction, fracture, stagger, water

15,000

5

Broken, deformation, deposit, other, joint offset, normal, obstacle, water

1435 × 1054–296 × 166

NA

18,333

China

[70]

[39]

6

Attached deposits, collapse, deformation, displaced joint, infiltration, joint damage, settled deposit

NA

NA

1045

China

[41]

[40]

7

Circumferential crack, longitudinal crack, multiple crack

320 × 240

NA

335

USA

[11]

8

Debris, joint faulty, joint open, longitudinal, protruding, surface

NA

Robo Cam 6 with a 1/3-in. SONY Exmor CMOS camera

48,274

South Korea

[71]

[41]

9

9

Broken, crack, debris, joint faulty, joint open, normal, protruding, surface

3 classes

1280 × 720

SVM

Robo Cam 6 with a megapixel Exmor CMOS sensor

115,170

Classification

South Korea

Recall: 90.3

Precision: 90.3

[52]

[42]

10 FPS

10

Crack, deposit, else, infiltration, joint, root, surface

NA

Remote cameras

2424

F1-score: 96.6

UK

15 min 30 images

[66]

[43]

[

73

]

[51]

11

11

Broken, crack, deposit, fracture, hole, root, tap

3 classes

NA

RotBoost and statistical feature vector

NA

1451

Canada

Classification

Accuracy: 89.96

[104

1.5 s/image

]

[44]

[

61

]

[52]

12

Crack, deposit, infiltration, root

12

7 classes

1440 × 720–320 × 256

Neuro-fuzzy classifier

RedZone® Solo CCTV crawler

Classification

3000

Accuracy: 91.36

USA

NA

[98]

[45]

[

56

]

[53]

13

Connection, fracture, root

1507 × 720–720 × 576

13

Front facing CCTV cameras

3600

USA

4 classes

Multi-layer perceptions

[

Classification

Accuracy: 98.2

99]

[46]

NA

14

Crack, deposit, root

928 × 576–352 × 256

NA

3000

USA

[97]

[47]

[

54

]

14

2 classes

Rule-based classifier

Classification

Accuracy: 87

FAR: 18

Recall: 89

NA

[57]

[55]

15

15

Crack, deposit, root

2 classes

512 × 256

OCSVM

NA

Classification

1880

Accuracy: 75

USA

[

NA

116]

[48]

[

65

]

[58]

16

Crack, infiltration, joint, protruding

1073 × 749–296 × 237

NA

1106

China

[122]

16

4 classes

[49]

CNN

Classification

Recall: 88

Precision: 84

Accuracy: 85

NA

[67]

[59]

17

Crack, non-crack

64 × 64

17

2 class

Rule-based classifier

NA

Classification

40,810

Accuracy: 84

FAR: 21

True accuracy: 95

NA

[58]

[65]

4000 × 46,000–3168 × 4752

18

4 classes

RBN

Canon EOS. Tripods and stabilizers

Classification

294

Accuracy: 95

China

NA

[73]

[51]

[

11

]

[

59

]

[64]

19

Collapse, crack, root

19

NA

7 classes

YOLOv3

SSET system

Detection

239

mAP: 85.37

USA

[61]

[52]

33 FPS

[

9]

20

Clean pipe, collapsed pipe, eroded joint, eroded lateral, misaligned joint, perfect joint, perfect lateral

20

NA

4 classes

Faster R-CNNSSET system

500

USA

Detection

[56]

mAP: 83

9 FPS

[53]

[

98

]

[45]

21

Cracks, joint, reduction, spalling

512 × 512

CCTV or Aqua Zoom camera

1096

Canada

[54]

21

3 classes

Faster R-CNN

Detection

22

Defective, normal

NA

CCTV (Fisheye)

192

USA

[57]

[55]

mAP: 77

110 ms/image

[99]

[46]

23

Deposits, normal, root

1507 × 720–720 × 576

Front-facing CCTV cameras

3800

USA

[72]

[56]

24

Crack, non-crack

240 × 320

CCTV

200

South Korea

[106]

F1-score

Harmonic mean of precision and recall

[69]

[38]

10

3 classes

CNN

Classification

Accuracy: 96.7

Precision: 99.8

Recall: 93.6Australia

[109]

[50]

18

Crack, normal, spalling

22

3 classes

Faster R-CNN

Detection

Precision: 88.99

Recall: 87.96

F1-score: 88.21

110 ms/image

[97]

[47]

[

23

2 classes

CNN

Detection

Accuracy: 96

Precision: 90

57]

0.2782 s/image

[

109

]

[50]

25

Faulty, normal

NA

CCTV

8000

UK

[65]

[58]

26

24

3 classes

Faster R-CNN

Detection

mAP: 71.8

110 ms/image

[105]

[63]

SSD

mAP: 69.5

57 ms/image

Blur, deposition, intrusion, obstacle

YOLOv3

mAP: 53

NA

33 ms/image

CCTV

27

Crack, deposit, displaced joint, ovality

NA

CCTV (Fisheye)

32

Qatar

[

25

2 classes

103]

[60]

29

Crack, non-crack

320 × 240–20 × 20

CCTV

100

NA

FAR

False alarm rate in all prediction samples

[57]

[55]

12,000

NA

[67]

[59]

Rule-based detector

Detection

Detection rate: 89.2

Error rate: 4.44

1 FPS

[106]

[57]

26

2 classes

GA and CNN

Detection

Detection rate: 92.3

NA[100]

[61]

[

100

]

[61]

30

Barrier, deposition, distortion, fraction, inserted

600 × 480

CCTV and quick-view (QV) cameras

27

5 classes

SRPN

10,000

Detection

mAP: 50.8

Recall: 82.4

China

153 ms/image

[110]

[62]

[

110

]

[62]

31

28

Fracture

1 class

NA

CNN and YOLOv3

CCTV

2100

USA

Detection

AP: 71

[

65 ms/image

105]

[63]

[

108

]

[66]

32

Broken, crack, fracture, joint open

29

NA

3 classes

CCTV

DilaSeg-CRF

291

China

[59]

[64]

3.2. Evaluation Metric

The studied performances are ambiguous and unreliable if there is no suitable metric. In order to present a comprehensive evaluation, multitudinous methods are proposed in recent studies. Detailed descriptions of different evaluation metrics are explained in Table 3. Table 4 presents the performances of the investigated algorithms on different datasets in terms of different metrics.

Segmentation

PA: 98.69

mPA: 91.57

mIoU: 84.85

fwIoU: 97.47

107 ms/image

[

116

]

[

48

]

30

4 classes

PipeUNet

Segmentation

mIoU: 76.37

32 FPS

[122]

[49]

As shown in Table 4, accuracy is the most commonly used metric in the classification tasks [41,48,52,54,56,57,58,61,65,66,67,69,70,71,73][36][38][39][40][41][42][43][51][52][53][54][55][58][59][65]. In addition to this, other subsidiary metrics such as precision [11,48,67,69,73][11][36][38][51][59], recall [11,48[11][36][38][51][55][59],57,67,69,73], and F1-score [69,73][38][51] are also well supported. Furthermore, AUROC and AUPR are calculated in [49][37] to measure the classification results, and FAR is used in [57,58][55][65] to check the false alarm rate in all the predictions. In contrast to classification, mAP is a principal metric for detection tasks [9,98,99,105,110][9][45][46][62][63]. In another study [97][47], precision, recall, and F1-score are reported in conjunction to provide a comprehensive estimation for defect detection. Heo et al. [106][57] assessed the model performance based on the detection rate and the error rate. Kumar and Abraham [108][66] report the average precision (AP), which is similar to the mAP but for each class. For the segmentation tasks, the mIoU is considered as an important metric that is used in many studies [116,122][48][49]. Apart from the mIoU, the per-class pixel accuracy (PA), mean pixel accuracy (mPA), and frequency-weighted IoU (fwIoU) are applied to evaluate the segmented results at the pixel level.

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