Road crack detection using a single stage detector based deep neural network

Condition and deterioration of public and private infrastructure is an issue that directly affects the majority of the world population. In this paper we propose the application of a Residual Neural Network to automatically detect road and pavement surface cracks. The high amount of variance in the texture of the surface and variation in illumination levels makes the task of automatically detecting defects within public and private infrastructure a difficult task. The system developed utilises a feature pyramid core with an underlying feed-forward ResNet architecture. The output from the feature pyramid then feeds into two sub-networks. One sub-network associates a class with the output from the feature pyramid. The other sub-network regresses the offset from each of the output bounding boxes of the feature pyramid to the corresponding ground truth boxes during training. The network was trained on real world data from an already established dataset. The data used to train and test on is very limited, due to the lack of available road crack datasets in the public domain. Despite the limited amount of data, the proposed method achieves a very positive results with minimal error.