When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.
Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.
Abstract
Sewer pipelines as a critical civil infrastructure become a concern for municipalities since these networks are getting to their estimated service life. Meanwhile, new environmental laws and regulations, city expansions, and budget constraints make it harder to maintain these networks. On the other hand, access and inspect sewer pipeline by human-entry based methods are problematic and risky. Current practice for sewer pipeline assessment is using various equipment to inspect the condition of pipelines. One of the most used technologies for sewer pipelines inspection is Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). However, application of CCTV method in extensive sewer networks involves certified operators to inspect hours of videos, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error prone.
The main objective of this research is to develop a framework for automated defect detection and classification in sewer CCTV inspection videos using computer vision techniques and deep neural networks. This study is presenting innovative algorithms to deal with the complexity of feature extraction and pattern recognition in sewer inspection videos due to lighting conditions, illumination variations, and unknown patterns of various sewer defects. Therefore, this research includes two main sub-models to first identify and localize anomalies in sewer inspection videos, and in the next phase, detect and classify the defects among the recognized anomalous frames.
In the first phase, an innovative approach is proposed for identifying the frames with potential anomalies and localizing them in the pipe segment which is being inspected. The normal and anomalous frames are classified utilizing a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM). The proposed approach employs 3D Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) to extract spatio-temporal features and capture scene dynamic statistics in sewer CCTV videos. The OC-SVM trained by the frame features which are considered normal, and the outliers to this model are considered abnormal frames. In the next step, the identified anomalous frames were located by recognizing the present text information in them using an end-to-end text recognition approach. The proposed localization approach was performed in two steps, first the text regions were detected using maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) algorithm, then the text characters were recognized using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The performance of the proposed model is tested using videos from real-world sewer inspection reports, where the accuracies of 95% and 86% were achieved for anomaly detection and frame localization, respectively. Identifying the anomalous frames and excluding the normal frames from further analysis could reduce the time and cost of detection. It also ensures the accuracy and quality of assessment by reducing the number of neglected anomalous frames caused by operator error.
In the second phase, a defect detection framework is proposed to provide defect detection and classification among the identified anomalous frames. First, a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which is pre-trained using transfer learning, is used as a feature extractor. In the next step, the remaining convolutional layers of the constructed model are trained by the provided dataset from various types of sewer defects to detect and classify defects in the anomalous frames. The proposed methodology has been validated by referencing the ground truth data, and the accuracy of 91.44% was achieved. It is expected that the developed model can help sewer inspectors in much faster and more accurate pipeline inspection. The whole framework would decrease the condition assessment time and increase the accuracy of sewer assessment reports.
