Deep learning-based thermal image analysis for pavement defect detection and classification considering complex pavement conditions

Automatic damage detection using deep learning warrants an extensive data source that captures complex pavement conditions. This paper proposes a thermal-RGB fusion image-based pavement damage detection model, wherein the fused RGB-thermal image is formed through multisource sensor information to achieve fast and accurate defect detection including complex pavement conditions. The proposed method uses pre-trained EfficientNet B4 as the backbone architecture and generates an argument dataset (containing non-uniform illumination, camera noise, and scales of thermal images too) to achieve high pavement damage detection accuracy. This paper tests separately the performance of different input data (RGB, thermal, MSX, and fused image) to test the influence of input data and network on the detection results. The results proved that the fused image’s damage detection accuracy can be as high as 98.34% and by using the dataset after augmentation, the detection model deems to be more stable to achieve 98.35% precision, 98.34% recall, and 98.34% F1-score.