Detecting Various Road Damage Types in Global Countries Utilizing Faster R-CNN

Road damages are of great interest for federal road authorities and their infrastructure management as well as the automated driving task and thus safety and comfort of vehicle occupants. Therefore, we are investigating the automatic detection of different types of road damages by images from a front-facing camera in the vehicle. The data basis of our work is provided by the ’IEEE BigData Cup Challenge’ and its dataset ’RDD-2020’ with a large number of labelled images from Japan, India and the Czech Republic. Our Deep Learning approach utilizes the pre-trained Faster Region Based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN). In the first step, we classify the destination of the image followed by expert networks for each region. Between the explanation of our applied Deep Learning methodology, some remaining sources of errors are discussed and further, partly failed approaches during our development period are displayed, which could be of interest for future work. Our results are convincing and we are able to achieve an F1 score of 0 . 487 across all regions for longitudinal and lateral cracks, alligator cracks and potholes.