Pavement Distress Detection and Segmentation using YOLOv4 and DeepLabv3 on Pavements in the Philippines

Abstract: Road transport infrastructure is critical for safe, fast, economical, and reliable mobility within the whole country that is conducive to a productive society. However, roads tend to deteriorate over time due to natural causes in the environment and repeated traffic loads. Pavement Distress (PD) detection is essential in monitoring the current conditions of the public roads to enable targeted rehabilitation and preventive maintenance. Nonetheless, distress detection surveys are still done via manual inspection for developing countries such as the Philippines. This study proposed the use of deep learning for two ways of recording pavement distresses from 2D RGB images - detection and segmentation. YOLOv4 is used for pavement distress detection while DeepLabv3 is employed for pavement distress segmentation on a small dataset of pavement images in the Philippines. This study aims to provide a basis to potentially spark solutions in building a cheap, scalable, and automated end-to-end solution for PD detection in the country.