Deep Learning Approaches for Road Damage Detection Using YOLOv8 and Custom Convolutional Neural Network

The identification of road damage is deemed very important to the preservation of infrastructure. Since recent development in deep learning provide great potential approaches, in this paper, three deep learning models, namely EfficientNet, CNN and YOLOv8 are considered and their performance is evaluated on a dataset with 8,586 images with labelled road damages consisting of seven subclasses including longitudinal cracks and potholes. Besides, other issues like class imbalance and variabilities in the environment were studied and considered in its assessment based on the Models accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. With an accuracy of 64%, YOLOv8 is the most accurate model for identifying various types of damages, particularly in identifying multiple damages present in one or more types of damage, as was seen in the high accuracy rate of a split sample of 44 images of multiple damages. Our findings showcase YOLOv8 as a strong contender for real-time road damage detection with potential of enhancement with better augmentation and fine-tuning.