Abstract
Accurate detection of asphalt pavement distress is crucial for road maintenance and traffic safety. However, traditional convolutional neural networks usually struggle with this task due to the varied distress patterns and complex backgrounds in the images. To enhance the accuracy of asphalt pavement distress identification across various scenarios, this paper introduces an improved model named SMG-YOLOv8, based on the YOLOv8s framework. This model integrates the space-to-depth module and the multi-scale convolutional attention mechanism, while optimizing the backbone's C2f structure with a more efficient G-GhostC2f structure. Experimental results demonstrate that SMG-YOLOv8 outperforms the YOLOv8s baseline model, achieving Pmacro and mAP@50 scores of 81.1% and 79.4% respectively, marking an increase of 8.2% and 12.5% over the baseline. Furthermore, SMG-YOLOv8 exhibits clear advantages in identifying various types of pavement distresses, including longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, mesh cracks, and potholes, when compared to YOLOv5n, YOLOv5s, YOLOv6s, and YOLOv8n models. This enhancement optimizes the network structure, reducing the number of parameters while maintaining excellent detection performance. In real-world scenarios, the SMG-YOLOv8 model has demonstrated strong generalization capability and practical utility, providing crucial technical support for intelligent pavement distress detection.