Comparing Infrared and Visible Imaging for Tunnel Groundwater Recognition: A Multi-Model Systematic Evaluation
摘要
This study focuses on intelligent detection of groundwater seepage states on drill-and-blast tunnel faces and establishes a unified evaluation framework spanning two modalities—visible (VIS) and infrared (IR)—and five models (Faster R-CNN, SSD, DETR, YOLOv8, YOLOv11). VIS and IR images were sequentially acquired during the same inspection sessions on the same tunnel faces at four ongoing tunnel sites in western China, and, in accordance with the Railway Tunnel Design Code (TB 10003 − 2016) and on-site flow measurements, three seepage states—damp/dripping, rain-like/linear, and flowing—were annotated. All models were compared under identical data splits and unified training/inference protocols, with evaluation metrics including mAP@50, mAP@50–95, training-dynamics curves, and FPS. The comparative results show that, relative to VIS, IR provides higher overall stability and better recognition of safety-critical classes (“rain-like/linear” and “flowing”). For engineering deployment, the YOLO family offers a more favorable accuracy–speed trade-off and is therefore recommended as the primary choice.