Autonomous Road Damage Detection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images and YOLO V8 Methods

Using photos from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning algorithms, this research provides a revolutionary automated road damage identification method. In order to provide a secure and long-lasting transportation system, road infrastructure maintenance is essential. On the other hand, gathering road damage data by hand may be dangerous and labor-intensive. Therefore, we suggest using artificial intelligence (AI) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to greatly increase the effectiveness and precision of road damage identification. For object recognition and localisation in UAV photos, our suggested method makes use of three algorithms: YOLOv4, YOLOv5, and YOLOv7. We used a mix of a Spanish roadway dataset and the Chinese RDD2022 dataset for training and testing these methods. Our method obtains 59.9% average precision (mAP@.5) for the YOLOv5 versions, 65.70% mAP@.5 when using the YOLOv5 version using the Transformers Prediction the Head, or 73.20% mAP@.5 for that YOLOv7 version, testing results show the effectiveness of our methodology. These findings open the door for further study in this area and show the possibilities of employing deep learning and UAVs for automatic road damage identification.