Vision-Based Crack Detection for Wall-Climbing Robot on Building Surface
Xianghui Li1,2, Xin Fu3, Libo Pan2, Fancong Zeng1,2,*, Zhijiang Zuo1,2
1 State Key Laboratory of Precision Blasting, Jianghan University, Wuhan, 430056, China
2 School of Intelligent Manufacturing, Jianghan University, Wuhan, 430056, China
3 Dongfeng Special Component Co., Ltd., Shiyan, 442000, China
* Corresponding Author: Fancong Zeng. Email: 
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Non-contact Sensing in Infrastructure Health Monitoring)
Structural Durability & Health Monitoring https://doi.org/10.32604/sdhm.2025.073124
Received 11 September 2025; Accepted 10 November 2025; Published online 08 December 2025
Abstract
The present study proposes an autonomous visual inspection system based on Wall-Climbing Robot (WCR), with a view to addressing the shortcomings of traditional building crack detection methods, namely their low measurement accuracy, high manual dependence and insufficient environmental adaptability. The system has been developed to construct a crack recognition model with robust illumination adaptation by fusing the improved YOLOv5s target detection algorithm with the Canny edge enhancement algorithm. The system has been realized as a lightweight deployment on an embedded device (MaixCAM). The robot platform employs a design scheme integrating a dual-chamber negative pressure adsorption mechanism and a differential drive system, which effectively addresses the key technical challenges of stable motion and real-time image acquisition on the vertical wall. Concurrently, the embedded vision processing module accomplishes efficient data parsing within dynamic environments. The experimental findings demonstrate that the system’s detection accuracy consistently maintains a range of 88.3% to 95.6% under conditions of 1000-50 lux illumination. In comparison with conventional detection methods, the recognition accuracy of various types of building cracks is enhanced by 17.3%. This study proposes a pioneering technical solution for the intelligent detection of complex building surface defects, which holds significant engineering application value.
Keywords
Crack detection; wall-climbing robot; autonomous visual inspection system; building surface; YOLOv5s; Canny edge enhancement
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