Implementing textural features on GPUs for improved real-time pavement distress detection

The condition of municipal roads has deteriorated considerably in recent years, leading to large scale pavement distress such as cracks or potholes. In order to enable road maintenance, pavement distress should be timely detected. However, manual investigation, which is still the most widely applied approach toward pavement assessment, puts maintenance personnel at risk and is time-consuming. During the last decade, several efforts have been made to automatically assess the condition of the municipal roads without any human intervention. Vehicles are equipped with sensors and cameras in order to collect data related to pavement distress and record videos of the pavement surface. Yet, this data are usually not processed while driving, but instead it is recorded and later analyzed off-line. As a result, a vast amount of memory is required to store the data and the available memory may not be sufficient. To reduce the amount of saved data, the authors have previously proposed a graphics processing units (GPU)-enabled pavement distress detection approach based on the wavelet transform of pavement images. The GPU implementation enables pavement distress detection in real time. Although the method used in the approach provides very good results, the method can still be improved by incorporating pavement surface texture characteristics. This paper presents an implementation of textural features on GPUs for pavement distress detection. Textural features are based on gray-tone spatial dependencies in an image and characterize the image texture. To evaluate the computational efficiency of the GPU implementation, performance tests are carried out. The results show that the speedup achieved by implementing the textural features on the GPU is sufficient to enable real-time detection of pavement distress. In addition, classification results obtained by applying the approach on 16,601 pavement images are compared to the results without integrating textural features. There results demonstrate that an improvement of 27% is achieved by incorporating pavement surface texture characteristics

Utilising Convolutional Neural Networks for Pavement Distress Classification and Detection

This paper examines deep learning models for accurate and efficient identification and classification of pavement distresses. In it, a variety of related studies conducted on the topic as well as the various identification and classification methods proposed, such as edge detection, machine learning classification informed by statistical feature extraction, artificial neural networks, and real-time object detection systems, are discussed. The study investigates the effect of image processing techniques such as grayscaling, background subtraction, and image resizing on the performance and generalizability of the models. Using convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, this paper proposes a model that correctly classifies images into five pavement distress categories, namely fatigue (or alligator), longitudinal, transverse, patches, and craters, with an accuracy rate of 90.4% and a recall rate of 90.1%. The model is contrasted to a current state-of-the-art model based on the You Only Look Once framework as well as a baseline CNN model to demonstrate the impact of the image processing and architecture building techniques discussed on performance. The findings of this paper contribute to the fields of computer vision and infrastructure monitoring by demonstrating the efficacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification and the viability of using CNNbased models to automate pavement condition monitoring

Iteratively Optimized Patch Label Inference Network for Automatic Pavement Disease Detection

We present a novel deep learning framework named the Iteratively Optimized Patch Label Inference Network (IOPLIN) for automatically detecting various pavement diseases that are not solely limited to specific ones, such as cracks and potholes. IOPLIN can be iteratively trained with only the image label via the Expectation-Maximization Inspired Patch Label Distillation (EMIPLD) strategy, and accomplish this task well by inferring the labels of patches from the pavement images. IOPLIN enjoys many desirable properties over the state-of-the-art single branch CNN models such as GoogLeNet and EfficientNet. It is able to handle images in different resolutions, and sufficiently utilize image information particularly for the high-resolution ones, since IOPLIN extracts the visual features from unrevised image patches instead of the resized entire image. Moreover, it can roughly localize the pavement distress without using any prior localization information in the training phase. In order to better evaluate the effectiveness of our method in practice, we construct a large-scale Bituminous Pavement Disease Detection dataset named CQU-BPDD consisting of 60,059 high-resolution pavement images, which are acquired from different areas at different times. Extensive results on this dataset demonstrate the superiority of IOPLIN over the state-of-the-art image classification approaches in automatic pavement disease detection. The source codes of IOPLIN are released on \url{https://github.com/DearCaat/ioplin}.Comment: Revision on IEEE Trans on IT

Exploiting low-cost 3D imagery for the purposes of detecting and analyzing pavement distresses

Road pavement conditions have significant impacts on safety, travel times, costs, and environmental effects. It is the responsibility of road agencies to ensure these conditions are kept in an acceptable state. To this end, agencies are tasked with implementing pavement management systems (PMSs) which effectively allocate resources towards maintenance and rehabilitation. These systems, however, require accurate data. Currently, most agencies rely on manual distress surveys and as a result, there is significant research into quick and low-cost pavement distress identification methods. Recent proposals have included the use of structure-from-motion techniques based on datasets from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cameras, producing accurate 3D models and associated point clouds. The challenge with these datasets is then identifying and describing distresses. This paper focuses on utilizing images of pavement distresses in the city of Palermo, Italy produced by mobile phone cameras. The work aims at assessing the accuracy of using mobile phones for these surveys and also identifying strategies to segment generated 3D imagery by considering the use of algorithms for 3D Image segmentation to detect shapes from point clouds to enable measurement of physical parameters and severity assessment. Case studies are considered for pavement distresses defined by the measurement of the area affected such as different types of cracking and depressions. The use of mobile phones and the identification of these patterns on the 3D models provide further steps towards low-cost data acquisition and analysis for a PMS

Road Crack Detection Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Adaptive Thresholding

Crack is one of the most common road distresses which may pose road safety hazards. Generally, crack detection is performed by either certified inspectors or structural engineers. This task is, however, time-consuming, subjective and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel road crack detection algorithm based on deep learning and adaptive image segmentation. Firstly, a deep convolutional neural network is trained to determine whether an image contains cracks or not. The images containing cracks are then smoothed using bilateral filtering, which greatly minimizes the number of noisy pixels. Finally, we utilize an adaptive thresholding method to extract the cracks from road surface. The experimental results illustrate that our network can classify images with an accuracy of 99.92%, and the cracks can be successfully extracted from the images using our proposed thresholding algorithm.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposiu

Analytical Study of Deep Learning Methods for Road Condition Assessment

Automated pavement distress recognition is a key step in smart infrastructure assessment. Advances in deep learning and computer vision have improved the automated recognition of pavement distresses in road surface images. This task, however, remains challenging due to the high variations in road objects and pavement types, variety of lighting condition, low contrast, and background noises in pavement images. In this dissertation, we propose novel deep learning algorithms for image-based road condition assessment to tackle current challenges in detection, classification and segmentation of pavement images. Motivated by the need for classifying a wide range of objects in road monitoring, this dissertation introduces a Multi-Scale Convolution Neural Network (MCNN) for multi-class classification of pavement images. MCNN improves the classification performance by encoding contextual information through multi-scale input tiles. Then, an Attention-Based Multi-Scale CNN (A+MCNN) is proposed to further improve the classification results through a novel mid-fusion strategy for combining multi-scale features extracted from multi-scale input tiles. An attention module is designed as an adaptive fusion strategy to generate importance scores and integrate multi-scale features based on how informative they are to the classification task. Finally, Dual Attention CNN (DACNN) is introduced to improve the performance of multi-class classification using both intensity and range images collected with 3D laser imaging devices. DACNN integrates information in intensity and range images to enhance distinct features improving the objects classification in noisy images under various illumination conditions. The standard road condition assessment includes determining not only the type of defects but also the severity of detects. In this regard, a pavement crack segmentation algorithm, CrackSegmenter, is proposed to detect crack at pixel level. The CrackSegmenter leverages residual blocks, attention blocks, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASSP), and squeeze and excitation blocks to improve segmentation performance in pavement crack images