This paper summarizes the Global Road Damage Detection Challenge (GRDDC), a Big Data Cup organized as a part of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data'2020. The Big Data Cup challenges involve a released dataset and a well-defined problem with clear evaluation metrics. The challenges run on a data competition platform that maintains a leaderboard for the participants. In the presented case, the data constitute 26336 road images collected from India, Japan, and the Czech Republic to propose methods for automatically detecting road damages in these countries. In total, 121 teams from several countries registered for this competition. The submitted solutions were evaluated using two datasets test1 and test2, comprising 2,631 and 2,664 images. This paper encapsulates the top 12 solutions proposed by these teams. The best performing model utilizes YOLO-based ensemble learning to yield an F1 score of 0.67 on test1 and 0.66 on test2. The paper concludes with a review of the facets that worked well for the presented challenge and those that could be improved in future challenges.
Many municipalities and road authorities seek to implement automated evaluation of road damage. However, they often lack technology, know-how, and funds to afford state-of-theart equipment for data collection and analysis of road damages. Although some countries, like Japan, have developed less expensive and readily available Smartphone-based methods for automatic road condition monitoring, other countries still struggle to find efficient solutions. This work makes the following contributions in this context. Firstly, it assesses usability of the Japanese model for other countries. Secondly, it proposes a large-scale heterogeneous road damage dataset comprising 26620 images collected from multiple countries using smartphones. Thirdly, we propose generalized models capable of detecting and classifying road damages in more than one country. Lastly, we provide recommendations for readers, local agencies, and municipalities of other countries when one other country publishes its data and model for automatic road damage detection and classification. Our dataset is available at (https://github.com/sekilab/RoadDamageDetector/).
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