Attention-Enhanced Prototypical Learning for Few-Shot Infrastructure Defect Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thrainer, Christina, Ferdaus, Md Meftahul, Abdelguerfi, Mahdi, Guetl, Christian, Sloan, Steven, Niles, Kendall N., Pathak, Ken
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thrainer, Christina
Ferdaus, Md Meftahul
Abdelguerfi, Mahdi
Guetl, Christian
Sloan, Steven
Niles, Kendall N.
Pathak, Ken
author_facet Thrainer, Christina
Ferdaus, Md Meftahul
Abdelguerfi, Mahdi
Guetl, Christian
Sloan, Steven
Niles, Kendall N.
Pathak, Ken
contents Few-shot semantic segmentation is vital for deep learning-based infrastructure inspection applications, where labeled training examples are scarce and expensive. Although existing deep learning frameworks perform well, the need for extensive labeled datasets and the inability to learn new defect categories with little data are problematic. We present our Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN) framework for few-shot semantic segmentation of culvert and sewer defect categories using a prototypical learning framework. Our approach has three main contributions: (1) adaptive E-FPN encoder using InceptionSepConv blocks and depth-wise separable convolutions for efficient multi-scale feature extraction; (2) prototypical learning with masked average pooling for powerful prototype generation from small support examples; and (3) attention-based feature representation through global self-attention, local self-attention and cross-attention. Comprehensive experimentation on challenging infrastructure inspection datasets illustrates that the method achieves excellent few-shot performance, with the best configuration being 8-way 5-shot training configuration at 82.55% F1-score and 72.26% mIoU in 2-way classification testing. The self-attention method had the most significant performance improvements, providing 2.57% F1-score and 2.9% mIoU gain over baselines. Our framework addresses the critical need to rapidly respond to new defect types in infrastructure inspection systems with limited new training data that lead to more efficient and economical maintenance plans for critical infrastructure systems.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05266
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attention-Enhanced Prototypical Learning for Few-Shot Infrastructure Defect Segmentation
Thrainer, Christina
Ferdaus, Md Meftahul
Abdelguerfi, Mahdi
Guetl, Christian
Sloan, Steven
Niles, Kendall N.
Pathak, Ken
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Few-shot semantic segmentation is vital for deep learning-based infrastructure inspection applications, where labeled training examples are scarce and expensive. Although existing deep learning frameworks perform well, the need for extensive labeled datasets and the inability to learn new defect categories with little data are problematic. We present our Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN) framework for few-shot semantic segmentation of culvert and sewer defect categories using a prototypical learning framework. Our approach has three main contributions: (1) adaptive E-FPN encoder using InceptionSepConv blocks and depth-wise separable convolutions for efficient multi-scale feature extraction; (2) prototypical learning with masked average pooling for powerful prototype generation from small support examples; and (3) attention-based feature representation through global self-attention, local self-attention and cross-attention. Comprehensive experimentation on challenging infrastructure inspection datasets illustrates that the method achieves excellent few-shot performance, with the best configuration being 8-way 5-shot training configuration at 82.55% F1-score and 72.26% mIoU in 2-way classification testing. The self-attention method had the most significant performance improvements, providing 2.57% F1-score and 2.9% mIoU gain over baselines. Our framework addresses the critical need to rapidly respond to new defect types in infrastructure inspection systems with limited new training data that lead to more efficient and economical maintenance plans for critical infrastructure systems.
title Attention-Enhanced Prototypical Learning for Few-Shot Infrastructure Defect Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05266