Automated Pavement Distress Detection Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Pavement distress detection is crucial in road health assessment and monitoring. However, there are still some challenges in extracting pavement distress based on deep learning: such as insufficient segmentation, extraction errors and discontinuities. In this paper, we propose DARNet, a network for pavement distress extraction. A Distress Aware Attention Module (DAAM) is proposed to solve the problem of discontinuity in distress extraction due to inaccurate recovery of distress pixels during upsampling. Based on the characteristics of distress morphology, a Refinement Extraction Module (REM) is designed to effectively capture horizontal and vertical pavement damage features by fusing high-level and low-level features, which improves the accuracy of the model in extracting details of pavement damage information. Finally, a Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss function (WCEL) is introduced to assign weights according to the distance of the pixel point to the boundary of the distress, which solves the problem that the traditional cross entropy function treats each pixel point equally. We also propose a set of pavement distress datasets LNTU_RDD_GS, and the experimental results show that DARNet can reach 82.68% mIoU and 90.13% F score in the datasets in this paper, 80.63% mIoU and 88.35% F score in the four public datasets.