Prioritizing Test Cases Through Dual-Uncertainty Evaluating for Road Disease Detection System

Road damage detection system based on deep learning models has been extensively researched, capable of intelligently detecting damages in roads. However, to ensure reliability, a large number of images usually need to be collected and annotated to test the model. Collecting images is often a straightforward work, but annotating them is both time-consuming and costly. To minimize annotation costs during the testing phase, we can evaluate images using Test Prioritization method to select more meaningful samples for system testing. Yet, most mainstream work currently only evaluates cases based on classification result, neglecting the impact of localization. At the same time, these methods do not provide higher evaluation results to complex images that may detect errors or images where targets cannot be detected at all. To address these issues, we propose a new Test Prioritization tool, Dual-u, to evaluate road damage cases. It consists of two components: (1) Localization Uncertainty Evaluation, which evaluates the localization of damages while considering the value of the image, ensuring that complex images and images where targets cannot be detected also have higher priority; (2) Classification Uncertainty Evaluation, which evaluates the classification of damages. To evaluate Dual-u, we conduct extensive experiments using two object detection model architectures on multiple road disease datasets, and the results demonstrate that Dual-u outperforms existing methods in evaluating cases. Moreover, Dual-u can also be used to improve the accuracy and robustness of road disease detection models.