Efficient and accurate road crack detection technology based on YOLOv8-ES

Abstract

Road damage detection is an important aspect of road maintenance. Traditional manual inspections are laborious and imprecise. With the rise of deep learning technology, pavement detection methods employing deep neural networks give an efficient and accurate solution. However, due to background diversity, limited resolution, and fracture similarity, it is tough to detect road cracks with high accuracy. In this study, we offer a unique, efficient and accurate road crack damage detection, namely YOLOv8-ES. We present a novel dynamic convolutional layer(EDCM) that successfully increases the feature extraction capabilities for small fractures. At the same time, we also present a new attention mechanism (SGAM). It can effectively retain crucial information and increase the network feature extraction capacity. The Wise-IoU technique contains a dynamic, non-monotonic focusing mechanism designed to return to the goal-bounding box more precisely, especially for low-quality samples. We validate our method on both RDD2022 and VOC2007 datasets. The experimental results suggest that YOLOv8-ES performs well. This unique approach provides great support for the development of intelligent road maintenance systems and is projected to achieve further advances in future applications.