A Hybrid Game Engine—Generative AI Framework for Overcoming Data Scarcity in Open-Pit Crack Detection

Open-pit mining relies heavily on visual inspection to identify indicators of slope instability such as surface cracks. Early identification of these geotechnical hazards allows for the implementation of safety interventions to protect both workers and assets in the event of slope failures or landslides. While computer vision (CV) approaches offer a promising avenue for autonomous crack detection, their effectiveness remains constrained by the scarcity of labelled geotechnical datasets. Deep learning (DL) models require large amounts of representative training data to generalize to unseen conditions; however, collecting such data from operational mine sites is limited by safety, cost, and data confidentiality constraints. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid game engine—generative artificial intelligence (AI) framework for large-scale dataset synthesis. Leveraging a parameterized virtual environment developed in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), the framework captures realistic images of open-pit surface cracks and enriches their visual diversity using StyleGAN2-ADA. The resulting datasets were used to train the YOLOv11 real-time object detection model and evaluated on a real-world dataset of open-pit slope imagery to assess the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving CV model generalizability under extreme data scarcity. Experimental results demonstrated that models trained on the proposed framework substantially outperformed the UE5 baseline, with average precision (AP) at intersection over union (IoU) thresholds of 0.5 and [0.5:0.95] increasing from 0.403 to 0.922 and 0.223 to 0.722 respectively, accompanied by a reduction in missed detections from 95 to eight for the best-performing configurations. These findings demonstrate the potential of hybrid generative AI frameworks to mitigate data scarcity in CV applications and support the development of scalable automated slope monitoring systems for improved worker safety and operational efficiency in open-pit mining.