To solve slow speed and low accuracy of traditional detection methods of tunnel lining cracks, especially under the complicated situation of tunnel in operation, this work proposed an improved You Only Look Once version X (YOLOX) tunnel lining crack image detection algorithm. First, Mobilenetv3 was used to replace YOLOX’s CSPDarknet network. The Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module was then added to the enhanced feature extraction network, and the IOU loss function was replaced by the generalised IOU (GIOU) loss function. A tunnel crack im...