PROJECT TITLE :

An Iteratively Optimized Patch Label Inference Network for Automatic Pavement Distress Detection

ABSTRACT:

We present a novel deep learning framework that we call the Iteratively Optimized Patch Label Inference Network (IOPLIN). This network is designed to automatically detect a wide variety of pavement distresses, not just specific ones like cracks and potholes. IOPLIN can be trained iteratively using only the image label by employing the Expectation-Maximization Inspired Patch Label Distillation (EMIPLD) strategy. It is able to successfully complete this task by deducing the labels of patches from images of pavement. IOPLIN has a number of advantageous advantages over other state-of-the-art single branch CNN models like GoogleNet and EfficientNet. These advantages include: Since IOPLIN extracts the visual features from unrevised image patches rather than the resized entire image, it is able to handle images of varying resolutions and adequately utilize image information, particularly for high-resolution images. This is made possible by the fact that IOPLIN does not resize the entire image. In addition to this, it is able to roughly localize the pavement distress without making use of any prior localization information during the training phase. We construct a large-scale Bituminous Pavement Disease Detection dataset that we call CQU-BPDD. This dataset is comprised of 60,059 high-resolution pavement images that are acquired from different locations and at different times. The purpose of this is to better evaluate how effective our method is when it is put into practice. Extensive results on this dataset demonstrate that IOPLIN is superior to the state-of-the-art image classification approaches in automatic pavement distress detection. These results were obtained by comparing IOPLIN's results to those of other methods. IOPLIN's source codes are available for download at https://github.com/DearCaat/ioplin, and the CQU-BPDD dataset can be viewed at https://dearcaat.github.io/CQU-BPDD/. You can find more information about both of these resources on DearCaat's website.