Automated Pavement Distress Detection and Deterioration Analysis using Street View Map

Automated pavement distress detection benefits road maintenance and operation by providing the condition and location of various distress rapidly. Existing work generally relies on manual labor or specific algorithms trained by dedicated datasets, which hinders the efficiency and applicable scenarios of methods. Street view map provides interactive panoramas of a large scale of urban roadway network, and is updated in a recurrent manner by the provider. This paper proposed a deep learning method based on a pre-trained neural network architecture to identify and locate different distress in real-time. About 20,000 street view images were collected and labeled as the training dataset using the Baidu e-map. Eight types of distress are notated using Yolov3 deep learning architecture. The scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptors combined with GPS and bounding boxes were applied to judge the deterioration of the distress. A decision tree was designed to evaluate the change of the distress over some time. A typical road in Shanghai was selected to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. The images of the road from 2015 to 2017 were collected from the street view map. The results showed that the mean average precision of the proposed algorithm is 88.37%, demonstrating the vast potential of applying this method to detect pavement distress. 43 distress were newly generated, and 49 previous distress were patched in the two years. The proposed method can assist the authorities to schedule the maintenance activities more effectively.