Computer vision for road imaging and pothole detection:a state-of-the-art review of systems and algorithms

Computer vision algorithms have been utilized for 3-D road imaging and pothole detection for over two decades.Nonetheless,there is a lack of systematic survey articles on state-of-the-art(SoTA)computer vision techniques,especially deep learningmodels,developed to tackle these problems.This article first introduces the sensing systems employed for 2-D and 3-D road data acquisition,including camera(s),laser scanners and Microsoft Kinect.It then comprehensively reviews the SoTA computer vision algorithms,including(1)classical 2-D image processing,(2)3-D point cloud modelling and segmentation and(3)machine/deep learning,developed for road pothole detection.The article also discusses the existing challenges and future development trends of computer vision-based road pothole detection approaches:classical 2-D image processing-based and 3-D point cloud modelling and segmentation-based approaches have already become history;and convolutional neural networks(CNNs)have demonstrated compelling road pothole detection results and are promising to break the bottleneck with future advances in self/un-supervised learning for multi-modal semantic segmentation.We believe that this survey can serve as practical guidance for developing the next-generation road condition assessment systems.

Deep Learning Method to Detect the Road Cracks and Potholes for Smart Cities

The increasing global population at a rapid pace makes road trafficdense;managing such massive traffic is challenging. In developing countrieslike Pakistan, road traffic accidents (RTA) have the highest mortality percentageamong other Asian countries. The main reasons for RTAs are roadcracks and potholes. Understanding the need for an automated system forthe detection of cracks and potholes, this study proposes a decision supportsystem (DSS) for an autonomous road information system for smart citydevelopment with the use of deep learning. The proposed DSS works in layerswhere initially the image of roads is captured and coordinates attached to theimage with the help of global positioning system (GPS), communicated tothe decision layer to find about the cracks and potholes in the roads, andeventually, that information is passed to the road management informationsystem, which gives information to drivers and the maintenance department.For the decision layer, we projected a CNN-based model for pothole crackdetection (PCD). Aimed at training, a K-fold cross-validation strategy wasused where the value of K was set to 10. The training of PCD was completedwith a self-collected dataset consisting of 6000 images from Pakistani roads.The proposed PCD achieved 98% of precision, 97% recall, and accuracy whiletesting on unseen images. The results produced by our model are higher thanthe existing model in terms of performance and computational cost, whichproves its significance.