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Vision Transformer-Based Multi-Level Feature Fusion for Multi-Label Sewer Defect Classification

arxiv.org/abs/2609.11375

Updated 50 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294H21T0T1NEWBMZ43MHGZ7

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 50 min ago
arXiv
2609.11375
T1 · 50 min ago
Category
cs.CV
T1 · 50 min ago

Abstract

Automated classification of sewer defects is essential for infrastructure condition assessment and maintenance decision-making, but existing deep learning methods struggle to balance classification accuracy and computational complexity in large-scale multi-label scenarios. This study develops Sewer-Transformer-ML, a hierarchical vision Transformer with multi-level feature fusion, together with two lightweight architectures, Sewer-MobileNet-ML and Sewer-Mobile-TransNet, for resource-constrained inspection scenarios. On the Sewer-ML test set, Sewer-Transformer-ML-Base achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.68% and an $F1_{\text{Normal}}$ of 92.68%, ranking first on the public leaderboard and exceeding the second-ranked method by 7.6 percentage points in $F2_{\text{CIW}}$. Sewer-MobileNet-ML achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.73% with only 17 M parameters, representing an approximately 95% parameter reduction relative to the base model. Under the standard Sewer-Capsule data split, Sewer-Mobile-TransNet achieved 96.43% classification accuracy. When the training set was reduced to 1,177 images, pretraining on Sewer-ML consistently improved model performance. Ablation experiments further showed that direct concatenation was more effective for Transformer features, whereas attention-based fusion better supported multiscale CNN features. These findings provide a computational basis for automated sewer inspection, lightweight model design, and adaptation across civil infrastructure inspection platforms.

Authors 7

Xu Fang, Zhuoran Wang, Qing Li, Shengyu Zhang, Guanzhi Deng, Jianbiao He, Qingquan Li

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
new

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.11375

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Categories
cs.CV

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.CV

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

50 min ago

Conflicts

None