Research on lightweight pavement disease detection model based on YOLOv7

Abstract

Rapid urbanization has made road construction and maintenance imperative, but detecting road diseases has been time-consuming with limited accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient YOLOv7 road disease detection model. Our approach involves integrating MobilieNetV3 as the backbone feature extraction network to reduce the network’s parameters and computational requirements. Additionally, we introduce the BRA attention module into the spatial pyramid pooling module to eliminate redundant information and enhance the network’s feature representation capability. Moreover, we utilize the F-ReLU activation function in the backbone network, expanding the convolutional layers’ receptive field range. To optimize the model’s boundary loss, we employ the Wise-IoU loss function, which places more emphasis on the quality of ordinary samples and enhances the overall performance and generalization ability of the network. Experimental results demonstrate that our improved detection algorithm achieves a higher recall rate and mean average precision (mAP) on the public dataset (RDD) and the NJdata dataset in Nanjing’s urban area. Specifically, compared to YOLOv7, our model increases the recall rate and mAP on RDD by 3.3% and 2.6%, respectively. On the NJdata dataset, our model improves the recall rate and mAP by 1.9% and 1.3%, respectively. Furthermore, our model reduces parameter and computational requirements by 30% and 22.5%, respectively, striking a balance between detection accuracy and speed. In conclusion, our road disease detection model presents an effective solution to address the challenges associated with road disease detection in urban areas. It offers improved accuracy, efficiency, and generalization capabilities compared to existing models.