Bolt Positioning Detection Based on Improved YOLOv5 for Bridge Structural Health Monitoring

To improve the stability of the bridge structure, we detect bolts in the bridge which cause the symmetry failure of the bridge center. For data acquisition, bolts are small-scale objects under complex background in images, and their feature expression ability is limited. Due to those questions, we propose a new bolt positioning detection based on improved YOLOv5 for bridge structural health monitoring. This paper makes three major contributions. Firstly, according to the calibration anchor boxes of bolts, the size and proportion parameters of the initial anchor boxes are optimized by K-means++ clustering algorithm to solve the initial clustering problem of anchor boxes in object detection. Second, the hypercolumn (HC) technique fuses the low-level global features of the trunk and the high-level local features of three different scales to solve the problem of the inefficient distribution of anchors and insufficient extraction of classification features. In this way, we improve the detection accuracy and speed of bolt detection. Finally, we establish a dataset of bridge bolts through network collection and public datasets, including 1494 images. We compare and verify the new method in the collected bolt dataset. The experimental results show that the precision (P) of the improved YOLOv5x is up to 87.3%, and the average precision (AP) is up to 86.3%, which are 6.5% and 5.9% higher than the original YOLOv5x, respectively.