Comparative Study of Lightweight Target Detection Methods for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Road Distress Survey

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are effective tools for identifying road anomalies with limited detection coverage due to the discrete spatial distribution of roads. Despite computational, storage, and transmission challenges, existing detection algorithms can be improved to support this task with robustness and efficiency. In this study, the K-means clustering algorithm was used to calculate the best prior anchor boxes; Faster R-CNN (region-based convolutional neural network), YOLOX-s (You Only Look Once version X-small), YOLOv5-s, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLO-MobileNet, and YOLO-RDD models were built based on image data collected by UAVs. YOLO-MobileNet has the most lightweight model but performed worst in accuracy, but greatly reduces detection accuracy. YOLO-RDD (road distress detection) performed best with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.701 above the Intersection over Union (IoU) value of 0.5 and achieved relatively high accuracy in detecting all four types of distress. The YOLO-RDD model most successfully detected potholes with an AP of 0.790. Significant or severe distresses were better identified, and minor cracks were relatively poorly identified. The YOLO-RDD model achieved an 85% computational reduction compared to YOLOv7-tiny while maintaining high detection accuracy.