Jellyfish Search-Optimized Deep Learning for Compressive Strength Prediction in Images of Ready-Mixed Concrete

Most building structures that are built today are built from concrete, owing to its various favorable properties. Compressive strength is one of the mechanical properties of concrete that is directly related to the safety of the structures. Therefore, predicting the compressive strength can facilitate the early planning of material quality management. A series of deep learning (DL) models that suit computer vision tasks, namely the convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are used to predict the compressive strength of ready-mixed concrete. To demonstrate the efficacy of computer vision-based prediction, its effectiveness using imaging numerical data was compared with that of the deep neural networks (DNNs) technique that uses conventional numerical data. Various DL prediction models were compared and the best ones were identified with the relevant concrete datasets. The best DL models were then optimized by fine-tuning their hyperparameters using a newly developed bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm, called jellyfish search optimizer, to enhance the accuracy and reliability. Analytical experiments indicate that the computer vision-based CNNs outperform the numerical data-based DNNs in all evaluation metrics except the training time. Thus, the bio-inspired optimization of computer vision-based convolutional neural networks is potentially a promising approach to predict the compressive strength of ready-mixed concrete.