Computer Vision-Based Patched and Unpatched Pothole Classification Using Machine Learning Approach Optimized by Forensic-Based Investigation Metaheuristic

During the phase of periodic asphalt pavement survey, patched and unpatched potholes need to be accurately detected. This study proposes and verifies a computer vision-based approach for automatically distinguishing patched and unpatched potholes. Using two-dimensional images, patched and unpatched potholes may have similar shapes. Therefore, this study relies on image texture descriptors to delineate these two objects of interest. The texture descriptors of statistical measurement of color channels, the gray-level cooccurrence matrix, and the local ternary pattern are used to extract texture information from image samples of asphalt pavement roads. To construct a classification model based on the extracted texture-based dataset, this study proposes and validates an integration of the Support Vector Machine Classification (SVC) and the Forensic-Based Investigation (FBI) metaheuristic. The SVC is used to generalize a classification boundary that separates the input data into two class labels of patched and unpatched potholes. To optimize the SVC performance, the FBI algorithm is utilized to fine-tune the SVC hyperparameters. To establish the hybrid FBI-SVC framework, an image dataset consisting of 600 samples has been collected. The experiment supported by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test demonstrates that the proposed computer vision is highly suitable for the task of interest with a classification accuracy rate = 94.833%.