Application of Deep Learning for Pavement Monitoring: Movement Towards Autonomous Future

Pavements are essential elements of transportation networks and are instrumental to the growth and development of a country. To harness the full potential of this infrastructure, it is necessary to maintain it in proper structural and functional conditions. Conventional techniques, such as manual inspection can be used to determine the functional conditions of the pavement. However, these techniques have different shortcomings, including high monitoring costs, time consumption and requirement of traffic control during pavement surveying. These shortcomings can be mitigated by utilizing various Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning and deep learning, for pavement surface inspection. This study aims to systematically review state-of-the-art deep learning techniques such as You Only Look Once (YOLO), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and vision transformer architectures for pavement distress detection. Deep learning techniques can autonomously detect various types of pavement distress including longitudinal and transverse cracks, rutting, faulting, patching, shoving, raveling and potholes from the pavement surface. The findings from the review indicate that YOLO and CNN were extensively employed by researchers, however in recent times, vision transformers gained popularity among researchers and pavement engineers. Overall, this study highlights the critical role played by different deep learning techniques in transforming pavement monitoring, leading to safer, more resilient, and sustainable transportation infrastructure.