Research and optimization of YOLO-based method for automatic pavement defect detection

Abstract

According to the latest statistics at the end of 2022, the total length of highways in China has reached 5.3548 million kilometers, with a maintenance mileage of 5.3503 million kilometers, accounting for 99.9% of the total maintenance coverage. Relying on inefficient manual pavement detection methods is difficult to meet the needs of large-scale detection. To tackle this issue, experiments were conducted to explore deep learning-based intelligent identification models, leveraging pavement distress data as the fundamental basis. The dataset encompasses pavement micro-cracks, which hold particular significance for the purpose of pavement preventive maintenance. The two-stage model Faster R-CNN achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.938, which surpassed the one-stage object detection algorithms YOLOv5 (mAP: 0.91) and YOLOv7 (mAP: 0.932). To balance model weight and detection performance, this study proposes a YOLO-based optimization method on the basis of YOLOv5. This method achieves comparable detection performance (mAP: 0.93) to that of two-stage detectors, while exhibiting only a minimal increase in the number of parameters. Overall, the two-stage model demonstrated excellent detection performance when using a residual network (ResNet) as the backbone, whereas the YOLO algorithm of the one-stage detection model proved to be more suitable for practical engineering applications.

Keywords

• pavement engineering
• pavement distress
• object detection
• optimization strategy
• yolo algorithms