Detection of Road Damages Using Machine Learning Methods with Data Collected from Various Geographies: A Study on Türkiye

Road damage seriously affects the comfort and safety of drivers. The detection of road damage is of great importance not only for transportation safety, but also in terms of cost. The detection of road damage is critical for enabling early intervention and repair. In this study, the road damage detection performance of the YOLO (You Only Look Once) v8 algorithm was evaluated using datasets obtained from different geographies, including Czechia -Türkiye, India-Türkiye, USA-Türkiye, and Japan-Türkiye. The findings revealed both the capabilities of the algorithm in damage detection and the challenges it faced in distinguishing certain types of damage. For the creation of the Türkiye dataset, images of roads in the province of Hatay were recorded. These images were labeled using Microsoft's VoTT application. Comparisons and evaluations were made among the developed models. Among these models, the Japan-Türkiye model yielded the best results with a 0.55 mAP and 0.54 F1 score. The results of the models indicated that the appearance of damage varies according to the geographical location and the quality of road data. It was observed that data consisting of local images and uncertain damage types were important in training.