Pothole detection in the woods: a deep learning approach for forest road surface monitoring with dashcams

Sustainable forest management systems require operational measures to preserve the functional design of forest roads. Frequent road data collection and analysis are essential to support target-oriented and efficient maintenance planning and operations. This study demonstrates an automated solution for monitoring forest road surface deterioration using consumer-grade optical sensors. A YOLOv5 model with StrongSORT tracking was adapted and trained to detect and track potholes in the videos captured by vehicle-mounted cameras. For model training, datasets recorded in diverse geographical regions under different weather conditions were used. The model shows a detection and tracking performance of up to a precision and recall level of 0.79 and 0.58, respectively, with 0.70 mean average precision at an intersection over union (IoU) of at least 0.5. We applied the trained model to a forest road in southern Norway, recorded with a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-fitted dashcam. GNSS-delivered geographical coordinates at 10 Hz rate were used to geolocate the detected potholes. The geolocation performance over this exemple road stretch of 1 km exhibited a root mean square deviation of about 9.7 m compared to OpenStreetMap. Finally, an exemple road deterioration map was compiled, which can be used for scheduling road maintenance operations.