Author(s)

Murad Al Qurishee¹, Weidong Wu², Babatunde Atolagbe³, Joseph Owino⁴, Ignatius Fomunung⁵, Mbakisya Onyango⁵

¹Graduate Transportation Associate, Tennessee Department of Transportation, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
²University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
³Transportation Engineer, Maryland Department of Transportation, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
⁴UC Foundation Professor and Department Head, Department of Civil & Chemical Engineering, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
⁵Department of Civil & Chemical Engineering, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.

With cutting edge deep learning breakthrough, numerous innovations in many fields including civil engineering are stimulated. However, a fundamental issue that civil engineering research community currently facing is lack of a publicly available, free, quality-controlled and human-annotated large dataset that supports and drives civil engineering deep learning research and applications on such as intelligent transportation including connected vehicle, structural health monitoring, and bridge inspection. This paper is a general discussion about demanding needs and construction of a long-anticipated dataset for researchers and engineers in civil engineering and beyond for providing critical training, testing and benchmarking data. The establishment of such a free dataset will remove a major hurdle and boost deep learning research in civil engineering and we hope this work will urge researchers, engineers, government agencies and even computer scientists to work together to start building such datasets. A framework has been developed for the proposed database. Also, some pilot study databases were developed for concrete crack detection, pavement crack detection using normal and infrared thermography, as well as pedestrian and bicyclist detection. A convolution neural network model called Faster RCNN was deployed to check the detection accuracy and a 98% detection accuracy of the proposed datasets was obtained.

Dataset, Deep Learning, AI, Civil Engineering, ITS, Transportation

Qurishee, M. , Wu, W. , Atolagbe, B. , Owino, J. , Fomunung, I. and Onyango, M. (2020) Creating a Dataset to Boost Civil Engineering Deep Learning Research and Application. Engineering, 12, 151-165. doi: 10.4236/eng.2020.123013.