OEM-HWNet: A Prior Knowledge-Guided Network for Pavement Interlayer Distress Detection Based on Computer Vision Using GPR

Accurate detection of interlayer distress based on ground-penetrating radar has been widely adopted for in-service asphalt pavement condition assessment to improve maintenance efficiency and reduce costs. However, accurate interlayer distress locating is challenging with limited adaptability to their large-scale variations, which significantly weakens the detection performance. This study proposed a novel automatic detection network based on YOLOv5s to detect interlayer distresses in asphalt pavement named OEM-HWNet. Firstly, an object enhancement module based on prior knowledge was designed to locate the regions of interlayer distress and enhance their characteristics. Then, wavelet convolution was added to increase the receptive field of the network and enhance the ability to capture low-frequency information. Finally, an additional detection head was added to improve the detection capability of interlayer distress with different sizes. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed network achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 89.6%, outperforming other advanced models, such as YOLOv5s, YOLOv8s, YOLOv11s, and Faster R-CNN. Incorporating prior knowledge into deep learning networks could provide an effective solution to detect interlayer distress of asphalt pavement.