Automatic Road Pavement Distress Recognition Using Deep Learning Networks from Unmanned Aerial Imagery

Detecting and recognizing distress types on road pavement is crucial for selecting the most appropriate methods to repair, maintain, prevent further damage, and ensure the smooth functioning of daily activities. However, this task presents challenges, such as dealing with crowded backgrounds, the presence of multiple distress types in images, and their small sizes. In this study, the YOLOv8 network, a cutting-edge single-stage model, is employed to recognize seven common pavement distress types, including transverse cracks, longitudinal cracks, alligator cracks, oblique cracks, potholes, repairs, and delamination, using a dataset comprising 5796 terrestrial and unmanned aerial images. The network’s optimized architecture and multiple convolutional layers facilitate the extraction of high-level semantic features, enhancing algorithm accuracy, speed, and robustness. By combining high and low semantic features, the network achieves improved accuracy in addressing challenges and distinguishing between different distress types. The implemented Convolutional Neural Network demonstrates a recognition precision of 77%, accuracy of 81%, mAP of 79%, f1-score of 74%, and recall of 75%, underscoring the model’s effectiveness in recognizing various pavement distress forms in both aerial and terrestrial images. These results highlight the model’s satisfactory performance and its potential for effectively recognizing and categorizing pavement distress for efficient infrastructure maintenance and management.