Smart Pothole Detection Using Deep Learning Based on Dilated Convolution

Roads make a huge contribution to the economy and act as a platform for transportation. Potholes in roads are one of the major concerns in transportation infrastructure. A lot of research has proposed using computer vision techniques to automate pothole detection that include a wide range of image processing and object detection algorithms. There is a need to automate the pothole detection process with adequate accuracy and speed and implement the process easily and with low setup cost. In this paper, we have developed efficient deep learning convolution neural networks (CNNs) to detect potholes in real-time with adequate accuracy. To reduce the computational cost and improve the training results, this paper proposes a modified VGG16 (MVGG16) network by removing some convolution layers and using different dilation rates. Moreover, this paper uses the MVGG16 as a backbone network for the Faster R-CNN. In addition, this work compares the performance of YOLOv5 (Large (Y_l), Medium (Y_m), and Small (Y_s)) models with ResNet101 backbone and Faster R-CNN with ResNet50(FPN), VGG16, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, and MVGG16 backbones. The experimental results show that the Y_s model is more applicable for real-time pothole detection because of its speed. In addition, using the MVGG16 network as the backbone of the Faster R-CNN provides better mean precision and shorter inference time than using VGG16, InceptionV3, or MobilNetV2 backbones. The proposed MVGG16 succeeds in balancing the pothole detection accuracy and speed.