Speed Bump and Pothole Detection Using Deep Neural Network with Images Captured through ZED Camera

The condition of the roads where cars circulate is of the utmost importance to ensure that each autonomous or manual car can complete its journey satisfactorily. The existence of potholes, speed bumps, and other irregularities in the pavement can cause car wear and fatal traffic accidents. Therefore, detecting and characterizing these anomalies helps reduce the risk of accidents and damage to the vehicle. However, street images are naturally multivariate, with redundant and substantial information, as well as significantly contaminated measurement noise, making the detection of street anomalies more challenging. In this work, an automatic color image analysis using a deep neural network for the detection of potholes on the road using images taken by a ZED camera is proposed. A lightweight architecture was designed to speed up training and usage. This consists of seven properly connected and synchronized layers. All the pixels of the original image are used without resizing. The classic stride and pooling operations were used to obtain as much information as possible. A database was built using a ZED camera seated on the front of a car. The routes where the photographs were taken are located in the city of Celaya in Guanajuato, Mexico. Seven hundred and fourteen images were manually tagged, several of which contain bumps and potholes. The system was trained with 70% of the database and validated with the remaining 30%. In addition, we propose a database that discriminates between potholes and speed bumps. A precision of 98.13% using 37 convolution filters in a 3 × 3 window was obtained, which improves upon recent state-of-the-art work.