A novel approach to label road defects in video data: semi-automated video analysis

Abstract Road defects like potholes have a major impact on road safety and comfort. Detecting these defects manually is a highly time consuming and expensive task. Previous approaches to detect road events automatically using acceleration sensors and gyro meters showed good results. However, these results could be significantly improved with additional usage of image analysis. A large, labeled image data set is required for training and validation. This paper presents a method to automate parts of the labeling task. The method is based on a simple two step approach: at first, an unsupervised algorithm detects possible events based on the acceleration data and filters those video sequences with defects. Second, a human operator decides based on the short video sequences if the event was due to an existing road defect and labels the corresponding area in an image.