For efficient road maintenance, an automated monitoring system is required to avoid laboriously and time-consuming manual inspection by road administration crews. One potential solution is to utilize image processing-based technologies, especially, as various sources of images have readily been available, e.g., surveillance cameras, in-vehicle cameras, or smartphones. Such image-based solutions enable detecting and classifying road damages. This paper introduces deep learning-based image analysis for road damage detection and classification. Our ensemble learning approaches with test time augmentation were thoroughly evaluated using the 2020 IEEE Big Data Global Road Damage Detection Challenge Dataset. Experimental results show that our approaches achieved an F1 score of up to 0.67, allowing us to win the Challenge.

Due to the prevalence of GPS-equipped cameras (e.g., smartphones and surveillance cameras), massive amounts of geo-tagged images capturing urban streets are increasingly being collected. Consequently, many smart city applications have emerged, relying on efficient image search. Such searches include spatial-visual queries in which spatial and visual properties are used in tandem to retrieve similar images to a given query image within a given geographical region. Towards this end, new index structures that organize images based on both spatial and visual properties are needed to efficiently execute such queries. Based on our observation that street images are typically similar in the same spatial locality, index structures for spatial-visual queries can be effectively built on a spatial index (i.e., R*-tree). Therefore, we propose a class of R*-tree indexes, particularly, by associating each node with two separate minimum bounding rectangles (MBR), one for spatial and the other for (dimension-reduced) visual properties of their contained images, and adapting the R*-tree optimization criteria to both property types.