RDD4D: 4D Attention-Guided Road Damage Detection And Classification

Road damage detection and assessment are crucial components of infrastructure maintenance. However, current methods often struggle with detecting multiple types of road damage in a single image, particularly at varying scales. This is due to the lack of road datasets with various damage types having varying scales. To overcome this deficiency, first, we present a novel dataset called Diverse Road Damage Dataset (DRDD) for road damage detection that captures the diverse road damage types in individual images, addressing a crucial gap in existing datasets. Then, we provide our model, RDD4D, that exploits Attention4D blocks, enabling better feature refinement across multiple scales. The Attention4D module processes feature maps through an attention mechanism combining positional encoding and "Talking Head" components to capture local and global contextual information. In our comprehensive experimental analysis comparing various state-of-the-art models on our proposed, our enhanced model demonstrated superior performance in detecting large-sized road cracks with an Average Precision (AP) of 0.458 and maintained competitive performance with an overall AP of 0.445. Moreover, we also provide results on the CrackTinyNet dataset; our model achieved around a 0.21 increase in performance. The code, model weights, dataset, and our results are available on \href{https://github.com/msaqib17/Road_Damage_Detection}{https://github.com/msaqib17/Road\_Damage\_Detection}.

ETLNet: An Efficient TCN-BiLSTM Network for Road Anomaly Detection Using Smartphone Sensors

Road anomalies can be defined as irregularities on the road surface or in the surface itself. Some may be intentional (such as speedbumps), accidental (such as materials falling off a truck), or the result of roads' excessive use or low or no maintenance, such as potholes. Despite their varying origins, these irregularities often harm vehicles substantially. Speed bumps are intentionally placed for safety but are dangerous due to their non-standard shape, size, and lack of proper markings. Potholes are unintentional and can also cause severe damage. To address the detection of these anomalies, we need an automated road monitoring system. Today, various systems exist that use visual information to track these anomalies. Still, due to poor lighting conditions and improper or missing markings, they may go undetected and have severe consequences for public transport, automated vehicles, etc. In this paper, the Enhanced Temporal-BiLSTM Network (ETLNet) is introduced as a novel approach that integrates two Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) layers with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layer. This combination is tailored to detect anomalies effectively irrespective of lighting conditions, as it depends not on visuals but smartphone inertial sensor data. Our methodology employs accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, typically in smartphones, to gather data on road conditions. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the ETLNet model maintains an F1-score for detecting speed bumps of 99.3%. The ETLNet model's robustness and efficiency significantly advance automated road surface monitoring technologies.

Crack Detection in Infrastructure Using Transfer Learning, Spatial Attention, and Genetic Algorithm Optimization

Crack detection plays a pivotal role in the maintenance and safety of infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and buildings, as timely identification of structural damage can prevent accidents and reduce costly repairs. Traditionally, manual inspection has been the norm, but it is labor-intensive, subjective, and hazardous. This paper introduces an advanced approach for crack detection in infrastructure using deep learning, leveraging transfer learning, spatial attention mechanisms, and genetic algorithm(GA) optimization. To address the challenge of the inaccessability of large amount of data, we employ ResNet50 as a pre-trained model, utilizing its strong feature extraction capabilities while reducing the need for extensive training datasets. We enhance the model with a spatial attention layer as well as a customized neural network which architecture was fine-tuned using GA. A comprehensive case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed Attention-ResNet50-GA model, achieving a precision of 0.9967 and an F1 score of 0.9983, outperforming conventional methods. The results highlight the model's ability to accurately detect cracks in various conditions, making it highly suitable for real-world applications where large annotated datasets are scarce.

Optimizing YOLO Architectures for Optimal Road Damage Detection and Classification: A Comparative Study from YOLOv7 to YOLOv10

Maintaining roadway infrastructure is essential for ensuring a safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation system. However, manual data collection for detecting road damage is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and poses safety risks. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, offer a promising solution for automating this process using road images. This paper presents a comprehensive workflow for road damage detection using deep learning models, focusing on optimizations for inference speed while preserving detection accuracy. Specifically, to accommodate hardware limitations, large images are cropped, and lightweight models are utilized. Additionally, an external pothole dataset is incorporated to enhance the detection of this underrepresented damage class. The proposed approach employs multiple model architectures, including a custom YOLOv7 model with Coordinate Attention layers and a Tiny YOLOv7 model, which are trained and combined to maximize detection performance. The models are further reparameterized to optimize inference efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble of the custom YOLOv7 model with three Coordinate Attention layers and the default Tiny YOLOv7 model achieves an F1 score of 0.7027 with an inference speed of 0.0547 seconds per image. The complete pipeline, including data preprocessing, model training, and inference scripts, is publicly available on the project's GitHub repository, enabling reproducibility and facilitating further research.

DAPONet: A Dual Attention and Partially Overparameterized Network for Real-Time Road Damage Detection

Current road damage detection methods, relying on manual inspections or sensor-mounted vehicles, are inefficient, limited in coverage, and often inaccurate, especially for minor damages, leading to delays and safety hazards. To address these issues and enhance real-time road damage detection using street view image data (SVRDD), we propose DAPONet, a model incorporating three key modules: a dual attention mechanism combining global and local attention, a multi-scale partial over-parameterization module, and an efficient downsampling module. DAPONet achieves a mAP50 of 70.1% on the SVRDD dataset, outperforming YOLOv10n by 10.4%, while reducing parameters to 1.6M and FLOPs to 1.7G, representing reductions of 41% and 80%, respectively. On the MS COCO2017 val dataset, DAPONet achieves an mAP50-95 of 33.4%, 0.8% higher than EfficientDet-D1, with a 74% reduction in both parameters and FLOPs.

Real-Time Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Network: Take Road Damage Detection as an example

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based Road Damage Detection (RDD) is important for daily maintenance and safety in cities, especially in terms of significantly reducing labor costs. However, current UAV-based RDD research is still faces many challenges. For example, the damage with irregular size and direction, the masking of damage by the background, and the difficulty of distinguishing damage from the background significantly affect the ability of UAV to detect road damage in daily inspection. To solve these problems and improve the performance of UAV in real-time road damage detection, we design and propose three corresponding modules: a feature extraction module that flexibly adapts to shape and background; a module that fuses multiscale perception and adapts to shape and background ; an efficient downsampling module. Based on these modules, we designed a multi-scale, adaptive road damage detection model with the ability to automatically remove background interference, called Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Model (RT-DSAFDet). Experimental results on the UAV-PDD2023 public dataset show that our model RT-DSAFDet achieves a mAP50 of 54.2%, which is 11.1% higher than that of YOLOv10-m, an efficient variant of the latest real-time object detection model YOLOv10, while the amount of parameters is reduced to 1.8M and FLOPs to 4.6G, with a decreased by 88% and 93%, respectively. Furthermore, on the large generalized object detection public dataset MS COCO2017 also shows the superiority of our model with mAP50-95 is the same as YOLOv9-t, but with 0.5% higher mAP50, 10% less parameters volume, and 40% less FLOPs.

Automated Road Safety: Enhancing Sign and Surface Damage Detection with AI

Public transportation plays a crucial role in our lives, and the road network is a vital component in the implementation of smart cities. Recent advancements in AI have enabled the development of advanced monitoring systems capable of detecting anomalies in road surfaces and road signs, which, if unaddressed, can lead to serious road accidents. This paper presents an innovative approach to enhance road safety through the detection and classification of traffic signs and road surface damage using advanced deep learning techniques. This integrated approach supports proactive maintenance strategies, improving road safety and resource allocation for the Molise region and the city of Campobasso. The resulting system, developed as part of the Casa delle Tecnologie Emergenti (House of Emergent Technologies) Molise (Molise CTE) research project funded by the Italian Minister of Economic Growth (MIMIT), leverages cutting-edge technologies such as Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing with GPU utilization. It serves as a valuable tool for municipalities, enabling quick detection of anomalies and the prompt organization of maintenance operations

YOLO9tr: A Lightweight Model for Pavement Damage Detection Utilizing a Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network and Attention Mechanism

Maintaining road pavement integrity is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient transportation. Conventional methods for assessing pavement condition are often laborious and susceptible to human error. This paper proposes YOLO9tr, a novel lightweight object detection model for pavement damage detection, leveraging the advancements of deep learning. YOLO9tr is based on the YOLOv9 architecture, incorporating a partial attention block that enhances feature extraction and attention mechanisms, leading to improved detection performance in complex scenarios. The model is trained on a comprehensive dataset comprising road damage images from multiple countries, including an expanded set of damage categories beyond the standard four. This broadened classification range allows for a more accurate and realistic assessment of pavement conditions. Comparative analysis demonstrates YOLO9tr's superior precision and inference speed compared to state-of-the-art models like YOLO8, YOLO9 and YOLO10, achieving a balance between computational efficiency and detection accuracy. The model achieves a high frame rate of up to 136 FPS, making it suitable for real-time applications such as video surveillance and automated inspection systems. The research presents an ablation study to analyze the impact of architectural modifications and hyperparameter variations on model performance, further validating the effectiveness of the partial attention block. The results highlight YOLO9tr's potential for practical deployment in real-time pavement condition monitoring, contributing to the development of robust and efficient solutions for maintaining safe and functional road infrastructure.

Cycle-YOLO: A Efficient and Robust Framework for Pavement Damage Detection

With the development of modern society, traffic volume continues to increase in most countries worldwide, leading to an increase in the rate of pavement damage Therefore, the real-time and highly accurate pavement damage detection and maintenance have become the current need. In this paper, an enhanced pavement damage detection method with CycleGAN and improved YOLOv5 algorithm is presented. We selected 7644 self-collected images of pavement damage samples as the initial dataset and augmented it by CycleGAN. Due to a substantial difference between the images generated by CycleGAN and real road images, we proposed a data enhancement method based on an improved Scharr filter, CycleGAN, and Laplacian pyramid. To improve the target recognition effect on a complex background and solve the problem that the spatial pyramid pooling-fast module in the YOLOv5 network cannot handle multiscale targets, we introduced the convolutional block attention module attention mechanism and proposed the atrous spatial pyramid pooling with squeeze-and-excitation structure. In addition, we optimized the loss function of YOLOv5 by replacing the CIoU with EIoU. The experimental results showed that our algorithm achieved a precision of 0.872, recall of 0.854, and mean average precision@0.5 of 0.882 in detecting three main types of pavement damage: cracks, potholes, and patching. On the GPU, its frames per second reached 68, meeting the requirements for real-time detection. Its overall performance even exceeded the current more advanced YOLOv7 and achieved good results in practical applications, providing a basis for decision-making in pavement damage detection and prevention.

Asset management, condition monitoring and Digital Twins: damage detection and virtual inspection on a reinforced concrete bridge

In April 2021 Stava bridge, a main bridge on E6 in Norway, was abruptly closed for traffic. A structural defect had seriously compromised the bridge structural integrity. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) closed it, made a temporary solution and reopened with severe traffic restrictions. The incident was alerted through what constitutes the bridge Digital Twin processing data from Internet of Things sensors. The solution was crucial in online and offline diagnostics, the case demonstrating the value of technologies to tackle emerging dangerous situations as well as acting preventively. A critical and rapidly developing damage was detected in time to stop the development, but not in time to avoid the incident altogether. The paper puts risk in a broader perspective for an organization responsible for highway infrastructure. It positions online monitoring and Digital Twins in the context of Risk- and Condition-Based Maintenance. The situation that arose at Stava bridge, and how it was detected, analyzed, and diagnosed during virtual inspection, is described. The case demonstrates how combining physics-based methods with Machine Learning can facilitate damage detection and diagnostics. A summary of lessons learnt, both from technical and organizational perspectives, as well as plans of future work, is presented.