An End-to-End Automated Pipeline for Controllable Crack Data Synthesis

Automated crack inspection increasingly relies on deep learning, yet its reliability is limited by scarce and weakly controllable defect data. Existing generative augmentation methods often treat crack synthesis as a generic image-generation task, offering insufficient control over morphology, boundary fidelity, and scene context. This paper proposes an end-to-end automated pipeline for controllable crack data synthesis that formalizes crack geometry and inspection context into reusable computational constraints. First, procedurally sampled Bézier-curve skeletons are translated into realistic crack masks using a GAN, enabling scalable generation of diverse crack morphologies without manual mask design. Second, a dual-ControlNet diffusion framework disentangles appearance guidance from geometric guidance, with an edge-based branch enforcing strict boundary consistency. The framework supports both background-free synthesis and context-aware inpainting. Experiments on CRACK500 and CrackTree200 show consistent gains over existing augmentation baselines, demonstrating a scalable engineering informatics workflow for automated crack-inspection data generation.