Multi-Object Detection for Daily Road Maintenance Inspection With UAV Based on Improved <i>YOLOv8</i>

Daily road maintenance is essential to road safety and serviceability, particularly to highways. In daily road maintenance inspection tasks, the objectives include a variety of targets, such as pavement cracks, foreign objects, guardrail damages etc. There is a lack of rapid detection methods that allow for the uniform identification of multiple targets for road maintenance. This paper proposes an automatic multi-object detection method for road daily maintenance inspection assisted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A dataset of multiple roadway anomalies (UAVROAD) for daily road maintenance needs was constructed. UM-YOLO, an improved algorithm based on the YOLOv8n algorithm was created to better extract the features of multiple targets, as well as fuse features and reduce computation while maintaining accuracy. The improvements include adding EMA (Efficient multiscale Attention Module) in the C2f module in the backbone, employing Bi-FPN fusion mechanism in the neck and using GSConv, a lightweight convolutional network, for the convolution operation. Compared with the YOLOv8n, the proposed UM-YOLO improved mean average precision(mAP) by 4.6% and reduced the model computation by 14%.