ROAD DAMAGE DETECTION & SEVERITY CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

Road infrastructure plays a critical role in transportation, economic development, and public safety. Damaged roads containing potholes, cracks, surface deterioration, and other defects can increase the risk of accidents, vehicle damage, and traffic disruptions. Traditional road-inspection methods generally depend on manual surveys in which inspectors visually examine roads and record defects. Such methods require considerable time and resources and may produce inconsistent results. The Road Damage Detection & Severity Classification System is proposed as an intelligent computer-vision solution for automatically identifying road defects and determining their severity. The proposed system uses image-processing and deep-learning techniques to analyze road images or video captured using cameras, smartphones, vehicle-mounted cameras, or other imaging devices. The system detects visible road-damage regions and classifies them into categories such as potholes, longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and surface deterioration. Object-detection or image-segmentation models can be trained using labeled road-damage datasets to identify defects accurately under different environmental conditions. In addition to identifying road damage, the system estimates its severity using visual characteristics such as defect size, affected area, crack patterns, and detection confidence. Damage can be categorized into levels such as Low, Medium, and High severity, depending on predefined project criteria. The system can associate detected defects with location and timestamp information when suitable GPS-enabled devices are used. This information can help authorities prioritize roads that require immediate inspection or maintenance. The system provides a centralized dashboard for displaying detected road defects, severity levels, confidence scores, images, and location information. Maintenance authorities can use the generated information to identify high-priority areas and organize inspection or repair activities. Historical records can also be maintained to track whether previously detected road damage has been repaired or has increased in severity.