Cross-View and Cross-Time Tracking of Crack Evolution in Concrete

Abstract

Crack propagation provides richer information than static crack observations for evaluating structural conditions of concrete infrastructure and planning maintenance strategies. Unlike static crack detection, which can now be largely automated using computer vision, vision-based crack tracking is a coupled cross-view and cross-time problem: the same physical crack must retain its identity as camera viewpoints change, while newly developed growth must be distinguished from existing crack segments in a unified reference view. Existing segmentation and 3D reconstruction methods can recover crack masks or scene geometry, but they do not preserve crack identity across views or quantify temporal extension. To address this gap, this study formulates crack growth monitoring as a cross-view and cross-time crack-instance tracking task and proposes a geometry-assisted, morphology-aware framework. The framework first uses image-based geometric registration to align observations from different viewpoints into a shared structural reference, then applies morphology-aware instantiation to assign physically interpretable crack identities, and finally performs temporal mapping in the unified view to distinguish newly developed growth from existing crack segments. To enable evaluation, a temporally annotated dataset was established and used, covering three representative cracking scenarios: single dominant crack propagation, mixed-mode branching, and multiple-crack interaction, with pixel-level masks and cross-time instance labels. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can establish loose cross-view identity correspondence under changing viewpoints, while strict spatial overlap and growth localization remain limited by early micro-crack segmentability and projection drift, highlighting directions for future crack-monitoring research.