Rethinking Road Surface 3-D Reconstruction and
Pothole Detection: From Perspective Transformation
to Disparity Map Segmentation
Rui Fan
Umar Ozgunalp
Yuan Wang
Ming Liu
Ioannis Pitas
[Paper]
[GitHub]

Abstract

Potholes are one of the most common forms of road damage, which can severely affect driving comfort, road safety, and vehicle condition. Pothole detection is typically performed by either structural engineers or certified inspectors. However, this task is not only hazardous for the personnel but also extremely time-consuming. This paper presents an efficient pothole detection algorithm based on road disparity map estimation and segmentation. We first incorporate stereo rig roll angle into shifting distance calculation to generalize perspective transformation. The road disparities are then efficiently estimated using semi-global matching. A disparity map transformation algorithm is then performed to better distinguish the damaged road areas. Subsequently, we utilize simple linear iterative clustering to group the transformed disparities into a collection of superpixels. The potholes are finally detected by finding the superpixels whose intensities are lower than an adaptively determined threshold. The proposed algorithm is implemented on an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti GPU in CUDA. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed road pothole detection algorithm achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency.


This repository provides the road data used in this paper.

 [GitHub]


Paper and Supplementary Material

Fan, R., Ozgunalp, U., Wang, Y., Liu, M. and Pitas, I.
Rethinking Road Surface 3-D Reconstruction and Pothole Detection: From Perspective Transformation to Disparity Map Segmentation.
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. 2021.
(hosted on ArXiv)


[Bibtex]