RUC-Net is a U-shaped encoder–decoder network that combines elements from both the Unet and

Resnet architectures. In order to reduce the model parameters and computational complexity, the final
channel number of RUC-Net was 512 after four downsamplings. The residual block from ResNet replaces
the two 3 × 3 convolution layers in the encoder of the original Unet. This modification allows RUC-Net to
extract more precise crack feature information. RUC-Net incorporates the scSE attention module to
enhance detection performance. The scSE module improves the network’s ability to focus on relevant
spatial and channel information. To address class imbalance in pavement crack segmentation, RUC-Net
utilizes the focal loss function. This helps improve the network’s ability to handle challenging crack
patterns.