An Enhanced YOLOv8 Model for Real-Time and Accurate Pothole Detection and Measurement

Selçuk University, Computer Engineering Department, Konya, Turkey, stasdemir@selcuk .edu.tr, https://orcid.org/0000 - 0002 - 2433 - 246X Abstract: Potholes cause vehicle damage and traffic accidents, creating serious safety and economic problems. Therefore, early and accurate detection of potholes is crucial. Existing detection methods are usually only based on 2D RGB images and cannot accurately analyze the physical characteristics of potholes. In this paper, a publicly available dataset of RGB - D images (PothRGBD) is created and an impr oved YOLOv8 - based model is proposed for both pothole detection and pothole physical features analysis. The Intel RealSense D415 depth camera was used to collect RGB and depth data from the road surfaces, resulting in a PothRGBD dataset of 1000 images. The data was labeled in YOLO format suitable for segmentation. A novel YOLO model is proposed based on the YOLOv8n - seg architecture, which is structurally improved with Dynamic Snake Convolution (DSConv), Simple Attention Module (SimAM) and Gaussian Error Lin ear Unit (GELU). The proposed model segmented potholes with irregular edge structure more accurately, and performed perimeter and depth measurements on depth maps with high accuracy. With the proposed model, the values increased to 93.7%, 90.4% and 93.8% respectively. Thus, an improvement of 1.96% in precision, 6.13% in recall and 2.07% in mAP was achieved. The proposed model performs pothole detection as well as perimet er and depth measurement with high accuracy and is suitable for real - time applications due to its low model complexity. In this way, a lightweight and effective model that can be used in deep learning - based intelligent transportation solutions has been acq uired. Pothole Detection, YOLOv8 Segmentation, Depth Estimation, Intelligent Transportation Systems, RGB - D Imaging, Deep Learning 1. Introduction Potholes are one of the most common and dangerous types of road surface deterioration. It usually oc curs when water seeps into the asphalt or concrete surface and weakens the sub - layers, then the traffic load erodes the weakened area [1, 2] . Over time, small cracks widen into deep potholes.