Towards Real-world Deployment of Deep Learning Solutions for Global Road Damage Detection and Classification

Effective monitoring of essential road infrastructure is critical to ensure economic growth and community connectivity, as deterioration from climate change and intensive use can compromise safety and hamper emergency services. To address these critical issues, we propose optimized approaches for road damage detection using YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and YOLOv10 models, with fine-tuning and hyperparameter optimization to improve detection accuracy. Our approaches achieve good overall accuracy (in terms of F1-score) by combining models of different sizes and frameworks using ensemble methods. Moreover, to enhance the speed of inference, parallel processing techniques are used. In order to obtain fast detection performance, small models, such as YOLOv5-small and YOLOv8-nano were given priority in modeling to balance between detection accuracy and inference speed. In the context of the 2024 IEEE BigData Optimized Road Damage Detection Challenge (ORDDC’2024), our approach achieved an F1 score greater than 0.7 with an inference speed of 0.0432 seconds per image, meeting the ORDDC’s accuracy and inference speed goal.