Automated pavement distress recognition is a key step in smart infrastructure assessment. Advances in deep learning and computer vision have improved the automated recognition of pavement distresses in road surface images. This task remains challenging due to the high variation of defects in shapes and sizes, demanding a better incorporation of contextual information into deep networks. In this paper, we show that an attention-based multi-scale convolutional neural network (A+MCNN) improves the automated classification of common distress and non-distress objects in pavement images by (i) encoding contextual information through multi-scale input tiles and (ii) employing a mid-fusion approach with an attention module for heterogeneous image contexts from different input scales. A+MCNN is trained and tested with four distress classes (crack, crack seal, patch, pothole), five non-distress classes (joint, marker, manhole cover, curbing, shoulder), and two pavement classes (asphalt, concrete). A+MCNN is compared with four deep classifiers that are widely used in transportation applications and a generic CNN classifier (as the control model). The results show that A+MCNN consistently outperforms the baselines by 1∼26% on average in terms of the F-score. A comprehensive discussion is also presented regarding how these classifiers perform differently on different road objects, which has been rarely addressed in the existing literature.
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