SGL-Mamba: Structure-Aware Global–Local Mamba for Crack Segmentation

Accurate crack segmentation based on optical sensor imagery is of paramount importance for infrastructure health monitoring and disaster early warning. However, in complex natural scenes, cracks typically exhibit characteristics such as being thin and elongated, multi-branched, and having low contrast. Existing segmentation models struggle to balance low computational overhead with the simultaneous modeling of global topological continuity and the precise extraction of local details. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we introduce a Structure-Aware Global–Local Mamba (SGL-Mamba). Firstly, the SGL-Mamba Block is designed in the encoding stage, which significantly enhances the joint modeling capacity for continuous topological structures and edge textures through the synergy of a parallel directional scanning mechanism and a local perception branch. Secondly, we design a High–Low Frequency Separation Enhancement (HLFSE) module to reconstruct the skip connections. This module leverages frequency decoupling to adaptively suppress high-frequency background noise and alleviate the semantic gap. Finally, in the decoding stage, the Deformable Large Kernel Attention (D-LKA) is integrated, utilizing a dynamic spatial receptive field to precisely adapt to irregular crack orientations. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (Crack500, DeepCrack, and CrackMap) demonstrate that SGL-Mamba outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving an F1 score (F1) of 0.7982 ± 0.0038 and an mIoU of 0.8011 ± 0.0036 on the Crack500 dataset. While ensuring lightweight architecture and high computational efficiency, the proposed method provides an effective and practical solution for automatic crack detection.