Improving the Ability of a Laser Ultrasonic Wave-Based Detection of Damage on the Curved Surface of a Pipe Using a Deep Learning Technique

With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the economic, social, and technological demands for pipe maintenance are increasing due to the aging of the infrastructure caused by the increase in industrial development and the expansion of cities. Owing to this, an automatic pipe damage detection system was built using a laser-scanned pipe’s ultrasonic wave propagation imaging (UWPI) data and conventional neural network (CNN)-based object detection algorithms. The algorithm used in this study was EfficientDet-d0, a CNN-based object detection algorithm which uses the transfer learning method. As a result, the mean average precision (mAP) was measured to be 0.39. The result found was higher than COCO EfficientDet-d0 mAP, which is expected to enable the efficient maintenance of piping used in construction and many industries.