Deep learning-based pavement performance modeling using multiple distress indicators and road work history
Authors: Lu Gao, Zhe Han, Yunshen Chen
Organizations: Department of Construction Management, University of Houston · Center for Transportation Research, The University of Texas at Austin · Independent Scholar
Abstract
The deterioration of pavement is a complex and dynamic process determined by different factors including material, environment, design, and some other unobserved variables. Accurate predictions of pavement condition can help maximize the use of available resources for pavement management agencies through better coordinated preservation and maintenance activities. This paper uses deep neural networks such as the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the long short-term memory (LSTM) to model the pavement deterioration process. In this paper, pavement condition data and maintenance and rehabilitation history collected by the Texas Department of Transportation over the past 18 years were used. Twenty-one flexible pavement condition indicators, including cracking, rutting, raveling, and roughness, collected from more than 100,000 pavement sections were included in the proposed models. Promising preliminary results were obtained. Case study results show that the proposed CNN model outperforms standard machine learning models in predicting pavement condition values.
Automated pavement distress assessment requires more than image-level classification or coarse bounding box detection, demanding precise localization of thin, branching, and irregular cracks to achieve the geometric precision necessary for maintenance-relevant quantification. This paper presents a vision-based pavement distress analysis system based on Mask R-CNN instance segmentation and evaluates it on UWGB-StreetCrack, a custom field-collected roadway image dataset acquired with a vehicle-mounted smartphone and manually annotated with polygon labels for longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. Five Detectron2-based Mask R-CNN backbone variants were considered under a consistent fine-tuning protocol. The best-performing model, Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-101 FPN backbone, achieved 84.23% precision, 90.04% recall, and an F1 score of 87.04% under the project-specific bounding-box matching protocol. The same model produced an aggregate predicted crack-area fraction of 2.164%, closely matching the 2.170% ground-truth crack-area fraction. To contextualize the segmentation system against a detector-oriented alternative, a CSPDarknet53-based YOLO detector was also adapted and retrained on the dataset, reaching 27.5% precision and 20.7% recall on the validation protocol. The results show that instance segmentation is a practical direction for field pavement imagery and aggregate crack-area estimation, while also exposing open challenges in annotation consistency, class imbalance, confounder rejection, and mask-level benchmarking.
Unplanned network hardware malfunctions can interrupt services and result in expensive downtime in data centers. A deep learning-based predictive maintenance strategy is presented that utilizes thermal imaging and power sensor data to detect early indicators of equipment breakdown in routers, switches, and servers. A simulated dataset was generated comprising annotated thermal pictures and power readings indicative of three operating states: Normal, Warning, and Critical. Three ImageNet-pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) models ResNet-50, InceptionV3, and VGG16 were assessed together with a multi-modal CNN-LSTM fusion model that integrates visual and sensor time-series information. Experiments were performed with and without pre-processing procedures, including region-of-interest (ROI) extraction and normalization. In the absence of pre-processing, CNNs attained moderate accuracy (e.g., ResNet-50 at 52%), but ROI-based pre-processing significantly enhanced performance (ResNet-50 accuracy reaching 91%). The CNN-LSTM model attained the greatest accuracy of 94%, with precision and recall approaching 95%, illustrating the effectiveness of multi-modal fusion. The results validate that domain-specific pre-processing and sensor fusion substantially improve early failure prediction, providing a potential foundation for proactive maintenance of network hardware through non-intrusive monitoring.
Vehicle-mounted road cameras are vulnerable to motion blur, defocus, poor illumination, and noise, which can erase thin cracks and pothole boundaries needed by road defect detectors. This paper presents RMR-Net, a compact task-aware restoration front end that estimates degradation evidence from the image, optionally fuses it with existing corruption context/parameters, conditions lightweight restoration blocks, and returns high-frequency pavement detail through a bounded residual path. The experimental scope is deliberately controlled: the conditioning information used on the Image and Vision Computing New Zealand (IVCNZ) pothole dataset and the Road Damage Dataset: Potholes, Cracks and Manholes (PCM) consists of saved synthetic-generator parameters, not measured vehicle telemetry. A clean-trained, frozen YOLO11s detector evaluates every image source. Across eight held-out degradation conditions, RMR-Net obtains the highest mAP50 in seven, including 0.140-0.427 for IVCNZ motion blur and 0.060-0.233 for PCM defocus. A compact ablation identifies the bounded detail path as the largest local contributor, while degradation conditioning and detector-aware stability terms provide complementary guidance.