DROA-CLIPSeg: Prompt-Guided Thin Crack Segmentation in Low-Light Conditions

Overview & Synopsis

Pavement crack segmentation under low light is degraded by reduced contrast, shadows, headlight glare, joints, stains, and wet seams. Existing crack segmentation methods mostly assume good illumination. Low-light enhancement methods improve visual quality, but they do not explicitly preserve crack topology. To address these limitations, we formulate low-light crack segmentation as a degradation-aware, prompt-grounded structural defect segmentation problem and propose DROA-CLIPSeg, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a frozen CLIPSeg vision language backbone using two lightweight modules. QKV Low-Rank Adaptation is injected into the Q/K/V projections of the vision and text encoders to improve crack-specific image text alignment without backbone fine-tuning. The proposed Domain Residual Orthogonal Adapter (DROA) decomposes intermediate features into a dominant crack-domain branch, which captures recurring low-light crack patterns, and an orthogonal residual branch, which preserves faint, thin, and fragmented evidence usually suppressed by noise, shadow, or over-smoothing. We also introduce CrackLingo-9K and CrackLingo-12K, text augmented versions of Crack9k and Crack12k with crack-aware prompts. Training only approximately 1.93 M parameters, corresponding to 1.3% of the full model, DROA-CLIPSeg outperforms 9 zero-shot and 4 fine-tuned vision language baselines on both splits, generalises zero-shot to MVTec AD across textures and defect morphologies, and is supported by extensive ablations. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/VShuklacode/DROA-CLIPSeg