Road Damage Detection Using YOLOv7 with Cluster Weighted Distance-IoU NMS

Road damage can occur everywhere. Potholes are one of the most common types of road damage. Previous research that used images as input for pothole detection used the Faster Regional Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) method. It has a large inference time because it is a two-stage detection method. The object detection method requires post-processing for its detection results to save only the best prediction from the method, namely, non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, the original NMS could not properly detect small, far, and two objects close to each other. Therefore, this research uses the YoloV7 method as the object detection method because it has better mean Average Precision (mAP) results and a lower inference time than other object detection methods; with an improved NMS method, namely Cluster Weighted Distance Intersection over Union (DIoU) NMS (CWD-NMS), to solve small or close potholes. When training YoloV7, we combined a new, independently collected pothole dataset, with previous public research datasets, where the detection results of the YoloV7 method were better than those of Faster R-CNN. The YoloV7 method was trained using various scenarios. The best scenario during training is using the best checkpoint without using a scheduler. The mAP.5 and mAP.5-.95 value of CWD-NMS was 89.20% and 63.30% with 10.30 millisecond per image for inference time.