Crack Detection Based on a Marked Point Process Model

—This paper studies the problem of crack detection in images characterized by high gradient backgrounds. We propose an extension of a Marked Point Process model which has been successfully used for wrinkle detection. We show that our method exhibits state of the art results on a difficult image dataset, by proposing a robust trade-off between local analysis approaches, which exploit a limited amount of information around the area of interest, and global reconnection strategies, which aim to detect the crack at image level. Additional tests on a standard dataset show that the proposed method exhibits excellent performance on images with a more uniform background as well, underlining its usefulness in varying contexts.