Road Surface Defect Detection Algorithm Based on YOLOv8

In maintaining roads and ensuring safety, promptly detecting and repairing pavement defects is crucial. However, conventional detection methods demand substantial manpower, incur high costs, and suffer from low efficiency. To enhance road maintenance efficiency and reduce costs, we propose an improved algorithm based on YOLOv8. Our method incorporates several key enhancements. First, we replace conventional convolutions with a module composed of spatial-to-depth layers and nonstrided convolution layers (SPD-Conv) in the network backbone, enhancing the capability of recognizing small-sized defects. Second, we replace the neck of YOLOv8 with the neck of the ASF-YOLO network to fully integrate spatial and scale features, improving multiscale feature extraction capability. Additionally, we introduce the FasterNet block from the FasterNet network into C2f to minimize redundant computations. Furthermore, we utilize Wise-IoU (WIoU) to optimize the model’s loss function, which accounts for the quality factors of objects more effectively, enabling adaptive learning adjustments based on samples of varying qualities. Our model was evaluated on the RDD2022 road damage dataset, demonstrating significant improvements over the baseline model. Specifically, with a 2.8% improvement in mAP and a detection speed reaching 43 FPS, our method proves to be highly effective in real-time road damage detection tasks.