Infrastructure-Guided Connectivity-Enhanced Road Crack Detection and Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel infrastructure-guided communication system for road crack detection on vehicles, combining custom protocols, image processing, and advanced models to improve detection accuracy.

Contribution

It presents the first infrastructure-guided, communication-enhanced crack detection pipeline that is practical for passenger vehicles, integrating hardware and software innovations.

Findings

Effective crack detection demonstrated on an experimental vehicle platform

Custom communication protocol successfully transmits regions of interest

Enhanced detection accuracy with state-of-the-art models and tailored datasets

Abstract

In this paper, we report the world's first infrastructure-guided communication-enhanced road crack detection pipeline that is effective and implementable on passenger vehicles. We first design a customized communication protocol to transmit the region of interest from the infrastructure to the vehicle. With proper camera image processing (e.g., dynamic cropping and frame selection), the focused images are provided to the crack detection model. Leveraging state-of-the-art crack detection model backbones and a carefully prepared dataset comprising a forward-facing view with a crack, we train the model to improve crack-detection performance. We demonstrate the full detection pipeline on an experimental vehicle platform, showcase the detection effectiveness, and project future research directions.