Implementation of Pavement Defect Detection System on Edge Computing Platform

Road surfaces in Taiwan, as well as other developed countries, often experience structural failures, such as patches, bumps, longitudinal and lateral cracking, and potholes, which cause discomfort and pose direct safety risks to motorists. To minimize damage to vehicles from pavement defects or provide the corresponding comfortable ride promotion strategy later, in this study, we developed a pavement defect detection system using a deep learning perception scheme for implementation on Xilinx Edge AI platforms. To increase the detection distance and accuracy of pavement defects, two cameras with different fields of view, at 70 degrees and 30 degrees, respectively, were used to capture the front views of a car, and then the YOLOv3 (you only look once, version 3) model was employed to recognize the pavement defects, such as potholes, cracks, manhole covers, patches, and bumps. In addition, to promote continuous pavement defect recognition rate, a tracking-via-detection strategy was employed, which first detects pavement defects in each frame and then associates them to different frames using the Kalman filter method. Thus, the average detection accuracy of the pothole category could reach 71%, and the miss rate was about 29%. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed detection strategy, experiments were conducted on an established Taiwan pavement defect image dataset (TPDID), which is the first dataset for Taiwan pavement defects. Moreover, different AI methods were used to detect the pavement defects for quantitative comparative analysis. Finally, a field-programmable gate-array-based edge computing platform was used as an embedded system to implement the proposed YOLOv3-based pavement defect detection system; the execution speed reached 27.8 FPS while maintaining the accuracy of the original system model.