Cracks on pavement surfaces are critical signs and symptoms of the degradation of pavement structures. Image-based pavement crack detection is a challenging problem due to the intensity inhomogeneity, topology complexity, low contrast, and noisy texture background. In this paper, we address the problem of pavement crack detection and segmentation at pixel-level based on a Deep Neural Network (DNN) using gray-scale images. We propose a novel DNN architecture which contains a modified U-net network and a high-level features network. An important contribution of this work is the combination of these networks afforded through the fusion layer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper introducing this combination for pavement crack segmentation and detection problem. The system performance of crack detection and segmentation is enhanced dramatically by using our novel architecture. We thoroughly implement and evaluate our proposed system on two open data sets: the Crack Forest Dataset (CFD) and the AigleRN dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods on the same data sets.