MDEM: A Multi-Scale Damage Enhancement MambaOut for Pavement Damage Classification

Pavement damage classification is crucial for road maintenance and driving safety. However, restricted to the varying scales, irregular shapes, small area ratios, and frequent overlap with background noise, traditional methods struggle to achieve accurate recognition. To address these challenges, a novel pavement damage classification model is designed based on the MambaOut named Multi-scale Damage Enhancement MambaOut (MDEM). The model incorporates two key modules to improve damage classification performance. The Multi-scale Dynamic Feature Fusion Block (MDFF) adaptively integrates multi-scale information to enhance feature extraction, effectively distinguishing visually similar cracks at different scales. The Damage Detail Enhancement Block (DDE) emphasizes fine structural details while suppressing background interference, thereby improving the representation of small-scale damage regions. Experiments were conducted on multiple datasets, including CQU-BPMDD, CQU-BPDD, and Crack500-PDD. On the CQU-BPMDD dataset, MDEM outperformed the baseline model with improvements of 2.01% in accuracy, 2.64% in precision, 2.7% in F1-score, and 4.2% in AUC. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that MDEM significantly surpasses MambaOut and other comparable methods in pavement damage classification tasks. It effectively addresses challenges such as varying scales, irregular shapes, small damage areas, and background noise, enhancing inspection accuracy in real-world road maintenance.