UnGAP: Uncertainty-Guided Affine Prompting for Real-Time Crack Segmentation

Real-time crack segmentation is vital for structural health monitoring but is plagued by aleatoric uncertainties arising from varying lighting, blur, and texture ambiguity. Current uncertainty-aware approaches typically treat uncertainty estimation as a passive endpoint for post-hoc analysis, failing to close the loop by feeding this information back to refine feature representations.

We contend that independent pixel-wise heteroscedastic modeling is uniquely suited for crack segmentation, as cracks are defined by fine-grained local gradients rather than the global semantic coherence relied upon in general object segmentation. However, this approach suffers from a structural optimization pathology: high predicted variance attenuates loss gradients, effectively causing the model to ignore difficult samples and under-fit complex boundaries.

To address these challenges, we propose UnGAP, a novel framework that establishes a closed-loop mechanism between uncertainty estimation and feature learning. Central to our approach is the Uncertainty-Prompted Feature Modulator (UPFM), which treats aleatoric uncertainty as an active visual prompt rather than a mere output.

UPFM dynamically calibrates feature distributions through pixel-wise affine transformations. Crucially, this mechanism mitigates the heteroscedastic pathology by transforming high variance, which would otherwise indicate gradient suppression, into a constructive signal for stronger feature rectification in ambiguous regions.

Additionally, a boundary-aware detection head is introduced to further constrain prediction precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UnGAP balances superior segmentation accuracy with real-time inference speed, effectively validating the benefit of transforming uncertainty from a passive metric into an active calibration tool.