arXiv · 2608.23136
Bridge Damage Detection from Low-Light UAV Imagery via Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Enhancement
Abstract
Poor illumination obscures small, low-contrast defects in UAV bridge imagery, reducing the reliability and operational flexibility of automated inspection. This paper investigates whether degradation-aware image restoration can improve bridge damage detection under low-light conditions and transfer from synthetic degradations to real inspection scenes. We propose DaL- MoE, a detector-agnostic restoration front end trained with an ISP-aware low-light synthesis pipeline and equipped with degradation-aware guidance estimation and complementary experts for noise suppression, color adjustment, and structural-detail recovery. On paired synthetic data, DaL-MoE achieves 23.12 dB PSNR and 0.8482 SSIM, increasing YOLOv11m box mAP50 from 0.3097 to 0.4923 and mask mAP50 from 0.2281 to 0.3529. On real low-light UAV imagery without paired normal-light references, sim-to-real evaluation shows improved defect visibility and more complete detections than direct inference on raw low-light inputs. Future work will develop low-light-aware bridge damage detectors with stronger cross-scene generalization across bridge sites, imaging conditions, and illumination levels.
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Hu Wang, Hongxu Pu, Zhiqi Hu, Fangzhou Lin, Wang Wang. 2026-08-24. Bridge Damage Detection from Low-Light UAV Imagery via Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Enhancement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23136
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