Description
Historic masonry lined tunnels form a large proportion of the world’s railway tunnel stock. However, as many of these date from the second industrial revolution over 150 years ago, they typically contain large areas of structural deterioration. Masonry spalling is a pervasive form of surface damage and its severity, defined by the depth of spalling, is indicative of a tunnel’s structural condition. Current tunnel spalling condition assessment procedures are largely manual, so the extent of spalling observed on many historic tunnels presents a challenge for timely and cost-effective assessment. Automated machine learning based workflows have shown substantial potential for automating and reducing the subjectivity of the assessment process. A key step in these workflows involves segmenting the location of masonry joints from 3D point clouds of the tunnel lining in order to isolate masonry block locations. The most prevalent method is to unroll 3D tunnel lining data into 2D before applying U-Net based convolutional neural networks to segment joint locations. However, recent developments in 3D point based neural networks enable semantic segmentation to be conducted directly on the input point cloud. Point based methods such as KPCONV provide 3D feature characterization and enable semantic segmentation of a wider variety of tunnel geometries by default, since a handcrafted unrolling strategy is not required. This study conducted a performance comparison between 3D KPCONV, 2D U-Net, and XGBOOST feature classifier based joint identification techniques. In order to effectively compare a real-world use-case where time consuming manual data labelling should be minimized, the methods were only trained on a 9.94m section of tunnel. It was found that a 2D U-Net combined with tunnel unrolling workflow could be more successfully trained on the case study dataset and due to effective transfer learning, achieved superior performance to KPCONV and XGBOOST methods.
