Real-Time Deep Learning based Road Deterioration Detection for Smart Cities

Timely road condition inspection and maintenance are key components of infrastructure management for smart cities, as they reduce traffic congestion, accidents and repairing costs. Traditional road inspection methods that employ vibrations and/or laser scanning for detecting road deterioration use expensive equipment and dedicated municipality vehicles. Recently, computer vision techniques and artificial intelligence are emerging as alternative solutions to traditional approaches for road condition detection, offering more flexibility, higher accuracy, and overall lower cost. In this paper, we utilize convolutional neural network-based and vision transformer-based object detection models to accurately identify road deteriorations namely, potholes, cracks, and alligators. We compare four different state-of-the-art models in terms of detection accuracy and speed. Performance evaluations have shown that, on the same dataset the Swin Transformer model outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin. With 74% detection accuracy, and 42 frames per second processing speed Swin Transformer exceled over EfficentDet, YOLOv4, and YOLOX. We also present a new comprehensive and balanced large-scale road condition dataset of 27,298 annotated images, captured by ordinary car cameras.