3D Reconstruction and Large-Scale Detection of Roads Based on UAV Imagery

Accurate and efficient detection of road damage is crucial in traffic safety and maintenance management. Traditional road detection methods have problems such as low efficiency and insufficient accuracy, making it difficult to meet the needs of large-scale road health assessments. With the development of drone technology and computer vision, new ideas have been provided for the automatic detection of road diseases. The existing drone-based road detection methods have poor performance in dealing with complex road scenes such as vehicle occlusion, and there is still room for improvement in 3D modeling accuracy and disease detection accuracy, lacking a comprehensive and efficient solution. This paper proposes a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle)-based 3D reconstruction and large-scale disease detection method for roads. By capturing aerial images with UAVs and utilizing an improved YOLOv8 model, vehicles in the images are identified and removed. Apply MVSNet (Multi-View Stereo Network) 3D reconstruction algorithm for road surface modeling, and finally use point cloud processing and DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering for disease detection. The experimental results show that this method performs excellently in terms of 3D modeling accuracy and speed. Compared with the traditional colmap method, the reconstruction speed is greatly improved, and the reconstruction density is three times that of colmap. Meanwhile, the reconstructed point cloud can effectively detect road smoothness and settlement. This study provides a new method for effective disease detection under complex road conditions, suitable for large-scale road health assessment tasks.