Robot-assisted endovascular navigation provides significant advantages, including reduced radiation exposure for surgeons and improved patient safety. However, a major challenge is to control curvilinear instruments like guidewires precisely for smooth and accurate navigation while adapting to anatomical variations and external forces. Traditional segmentation-based approaches struggle with real-time prediction of the guidewire’s evolving shape, limiting their effectiveness in navigation tasks. In this paper, we propose SplineFormer, an explainable transformer network that predicts the continuous, structured representation of the guidewire as a B-spline. This formulation enables a compact, smooth, and explainable state representation that facilitates downstream navigation. By leveraging SplineFormer’s predictions within an imitation learning framework, our system successfully performs autonomous endovascular navigation. Experimental results show that SplineFormer achieves a 50% success rate when fully autonomously cannulating the Brachiocephalic Artery in a real robotic setup, demonstrating its potential for improved autonomous navigation in endovascular interventions.

Road pavement detection and segmentation are critical for developing autonomous road repair systems. However, developing an instance segmentation method that simultaneously performs multi-class defect detection and segmentation is challenging due to the textural simplicity of road pavement image, the diversity of defect geometries, and the morphological ambiguity between classes. We propose a novel end-to-end method for multi-class road defect detection and segmentation. The proposed method comprises multiple spatial and channel-wise attention blocks available to learn global representations across spatial and channel-wise dimensions. Through these attention blocks, more globally generalised representations of morphological information (spatial characteristics) of road defects and colour and depth information of images can be learned. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted various ablation studies and comparisons with prior methods on a newly collected dataset annotated with nine road defect classes. The experiments show that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for multi-class road defect detection and segmentation methods.

Ensuring traffic safety is crucial, which necessitates the detection and prevention of road surface defects. As a result, there has been a growing interest in the literature on the subject, leading to the development of various road surface defect detection methods. The methods for detecting road defects can be categorised in various ways depending on the input data types or training methodologies. The predominant approach involves image-based methods, which analyse pixel intensities and surface textures to identify defects. Despite popularity, image-based methods share the distinct limitation of vulnerability to weather and lighting changes. To address this issue, researchers have explored the use of additional sensors, such as laser scanners or LiDARs, providing explicit depth information to enable the detection of defects in terms of scale and volume. However, the exploration of data beyond images has not been sufficiently investigated. In this survey paper, we provide a comprehensive review of road surface defect detection studies, categorising them based on input data types and methodologies used. Additionally, we review recently proposed non-image-based methods and discuss several challenges and open problems associated with these techniques.

The performance of road defect segmentation (a.k.a. pixel-level road defect detection) has been improved alongside with remarkable achievement of deep learning. Those improvements need a large-scale and well-constructed dataset. However, road surface materials or designs vary from country to country, and the patterns of defects are hard to pre-define. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-source domain adaptation method to boost the performance of road defect segmentation on an unlabelled dataset. The proposed method generates multi-source ensembled labels using transferred information from models trained with multiple labelled source domains, which are utilised as supervisory signals for the unlabelled target domain. Furthermore, to reduce the domain gap between each source domain and a target domain, these domains are re-aligned with outlier repositioning to improve the defect segmentation performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on Cracktree200, CRACK500, CFD, and Crack360 datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing unsupervised road defect segmentation methods and achieves competitive performance compared with recent supervised methods. The source code is publicly available on https://github.com/andreYoo/MSDA_RDS.git.