Autonomous pothole detection using deep region-based convolutional neural network with cloud computing

Road surface deteriorations such as potholes have caused motorists heavy monetary damages every year. However, effective road condition monitoring has been a continuing challenge to road owners. Depth cameras have a small field of view and can be easily affected by vehicle bouncing. Traditional image processing methods based on algorithms such as segmentation cannot adapt to varying environmental and camera scenarios. In recent years, novel object detection methods based on deep learning algorithms have produced good results in detecting typical objects, such as faces, vehicles, structures and more, even in scenarios with changing object distances, camera angles, lighting conditions, etc. Therefore, in this study, a Deep Learning Pothole Detector (DLPD) based on the deep region-based convolutional neural network is proposed for autonomous detection of potholes from images. About 900 images with potholes and road surface conditions are collected and divided into training and testing data. Parameters of the network in the DLPD are calibrated based on sensitivity tests. Then, the calibrated DLPD is trained by the training data and applied to the 215 testing images to evaluate its performance. It is demonstrated that potholes can be automatically detected with high average precision over 93%. Potholes can be differentiated from manholes by training and applying a manhole-pothole classifier which is constructed using the convolutional neural network layers in DLPD. Repeated detection of the same potholes can be prevented through feature matching of the newly detected pothole with previously detected potholes within a small region.