Enhancing road damage detection performance using the YOLOv9 model

Abstract

Roads are essential infrastructure that support community mobility, and their condition significantly impacts road user safety. However, manual road damage detection remains inefficient, time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error. To address this issue, this study proposed the YOLOv9 model for automated road damage detection and explored parameter combinations to optimize its performance. The proposed solution leverages the YOLOv9 model, which offers enhanced detection speed and accuracy compared to previous YOLO versions, due to its improved backbone and dynamic label assignment techniques. The method uses pre-trained weights and performs parameter tuning to adapt the model for identifying common road defects, including potholes, longitudinal, lateral, and alligator cracks. A publicly available dataset of road condition images was used for training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrated that the optimized YOLOv9 model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 62.8%, indicating a promising ability to detect multiple types of road damage accurately. This study highlights the potential of YOLOv9 as an effective tool for road monitoring systems, contributing to proactive maintenance strategies and more efficient infrastructure management.