Automatic detection of urban infrastructure elements from terrestrial images using deep learning

Abstract:

Urban infrastructure element detection is important for the domain of public management in large urban centres. The diversity of objects in the urban environment makes object detection and classification a challenging task, requiring fast and accurate methods. Advances in deep learning methods have driven improvement in detection techniques (processing, speed, accuracy) that do not rely on manually crafted models, but, instead, use learning approaches with corresponding large training sets to detect and classify objects in images. We applied an object detection model to identify and classify four urban infrastructure elements in the Mappilary dataset. We use YOLOv5, one of the top-performing object detection models, a recent release of the YOLO family, pre-trained on the COCO dataset but fine-tuned on Mappilary dataset. Experimental results from the dataset show that YOLOv5 can make qualitative predictions, for example, the power grid pole class presented the mean Average Precision (mAP) of 78% and the crosswalk class showed mAP around 79%. A lower degree of certainty was verified in the detection of public lighting (mAP=64%) and accessibility (mAP=61%) classes due to the low resolution of certain objects. However, the proposed method showed the capability of automatically detection and location of urban infrastructure elements in real-time, which could contribute to improve decision-making.

Keywords:
Deep learning; Urban infrastructure detection; Terrestrial images; YOLO algorithm