Road damage detection algorithm for improved YOLOv5

Abstract Road damage detection is an important task to ensure road safety and realize the timely repair of road damage. The previous manual detection methods are low in efficiency and high in cost. To solve this problem, an improved YOLOv5 road damage detection algorithm, MN-YOLOv5, was proposed. We optimized the YOLOv5s model and chose a new backbone feature extraction network MobileNetV3 to replace the basic network of YOLOv5, which greatly reduced the number of parameters and GFLOPs of the model, and reduced the size of the model. At the same time, the coordinate attention lightweight attention module is introduced to help the network locate the target more accurately and improve the target detection accuracy. The KMeans clustering algorithm is used to filter the prior frame to make it more suitable for the dataset and to improve the detection accuracy. To improve the generalization ability of the model, a label smoothing algorithm is introduced. In addition, the structure reparameterization method is used to accelerate model reasoning. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv5 model proposed in this paper can effectively identify pavement cracks. Compared with the original model, the mAP increased by 2.5%, the F1 score increased by 2.6%, and the model volume was smaller than that of YOLOv5. 1.62 times, the parameter was reduced by 1.66 times, and the GFLOPs were reduced by 1.69 times. This method can provide a reference for the automatic detection method of pavement cracks.