Abstract
Potholes on the roads are a serious hazard and maintenance burden. This poses a significant threat to road safety and vehicle longevity, especially on the diverse and under-maintained roads of India. In this paper, we present a complete end-to-end system called iWatchRoad for automated pothole detection, Global Positioning System (GPS) tagging, and real time mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM). We curated a large, self-annotated dataset of over 7,000 frames captured across various road types, lighting conditions, and weather scenarios unique to Indian environments, leveraging dashcam footage. This dataset is used to fine-tune, Ultralytics You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to perform real time pothole detection, while a custom Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module was employed to extract timestamps directly from video frames. The timestamps are synchronized with GPS logs to geotag each detected potholes accurately. The processed data includes the potholes' details and frames as metadata is stored in a database and visualized via a user friendly web interface using OSM. iWatchRoad not only improves detection accuracy under challenging conditions but also provides government compatible outputs for road assessment and maintenance planning through the metadata visible on the website. Our solution is cost effective, hardware efficient, and scalable, offering a practical tool for urban and rural road management in developing regions, making the system automated. iWatchRoad is available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
道路坑洞是严重的安全隐患和维护负担，尤其是在印度这样的多样化且维护不足的道路环境中，这对道路安全和车辆寿命构成了重大威胁。在本文中，我们介绍了一种名为iWatchRoad的端到端系统，该系统用于自动检测路面坑洞、GPS定位以及使用开放街道地图（OSM）进行实时映射。 为了开发这套系统，我们收集了一个庞大的自标注数据集，包含超过7,000帧图像，这些图像是在各种道路类型、照明条件和天气场景下捕捉到的。该数据集中使用的视频片段来源于行车记录仪。通过这一数据集，我们对Ultralytics公司的You Only Look Once (YOLO)模型进行了微调，以实现实时检测路面坑洞的功能。同时，我们还开发了一个定制化的光学字符识别（OCR）模块，用于直接从视频帧中提取时间戳信息，并将其与GPS记录同步，以便准确地标记每个发现的坑洞的位置。 处理后的数据包括坑洞详情和图像元数据，并存储在数据库中并通过友好的网络界面使用OSM进行可视化展示。iWatchRoad不仅提高了复杂条件下的检测准确性，而且还提供了政府兼容的输出用于道路评估和维护规划。我们的解决方案成本低廉、硬件效率高且可扩展，为发展中国家的城市和农村道路管理提供了一个实用工具。 此项目的详情可在以下链接中查看：[此处插入URL]
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10945
