A Computer Vision-assisted Approach to Automated Real-Time Road Infrastructure Management

Abstract: Accurate automated detection of road pavement distresses is critical for the timely identification and repair of potentially accident-inducing road hazards such as potholes and other surface-level asphalt cracks. Deployment of such a system would be further advantageous in low-resource environments where lack of government funding for infrastructure maintenance typically entails heightened risks of potentially fatal vehicular road accidents as a result of inadequate and infrequent manual inspection of road systems for road hazards. To remedy this, a recent research initiative organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ("IEEE") as part of their 2020 Global Road Damage Detection ("GRDC") Challenge published in May 2020 a novel 21,041 annotated image dataset of various road distresses calling upon academic and other researchers to submit innovative deep learning-based solutions to these road hazard detection problems. Making use of this dataset, we propose a supervised object detection approach leveraging You Only Look Once ("YOLO") and the Faster R-CNN frameworks to detect and classify road distresses in real-time via a vehicle dashboard-mounted smartphone camera, producing 0.68 F1-score experimental results ranking in the top 5 of 121 teams that entered this challenge as of December 2021.