This data article provides details for the RDD2020 dataset comprising 26,336 road images from India, Japan, and the Czech Republic with more than 31,000 instances of road damage. The dataset captures four types of road damage: longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes; and is intended for developing deep learning-based methods to detect and classify road damage automatically. The images in RDD2020 were captured using vehicle-mounted smartphones, making it useful for municipalities and road agencies to develop methods for low-cost monitoring of road pavement surface conditions. Further, the machine learning researchers can use the datasets for benchmarking the performance of different algorithms for solving other problems of the same type (image classification, object detection, etc.). RDD2020 is freely available at [1]. The latest updates and the corresponding articles related to the dataset can be accessed at [2].

The data article describes the Road Damage Dataset, RDD2022, encompassing of 47,420 road images from majorly six countries, Japan, India, the Czech Republic, Norway, the United States, and China. The dataset incorporates over 55,000 instances of road damage, specifically longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. Designed to facilitate the development of deep learning methodologies for automated road damage detection and classification, RDD2022 was unveiled as part of the Crowd sensing‐based Road Damage Detection Challenge (CRDDC'2022), with a major contribution from the challenge winners. This challenge garnered global participation, urging researchers to propose solutions for automatic road damage detection in multiple countries. A noteworthy outcome of CRDDC'2022 was the emergence of a top‐performing model achieving a remarkable F1 Score of 76.9% for road damage detection in all six countries using RDD2022. This success underscores the dataset's practical applicability for municipalities and road agencies, enabling low‐cost, automatic monitoring of road conditions. Beyond its immediate utility, RDD2022 stands as a valuable benchmark for researchers in computer vision, geoscience, and machine learning, offering a rich resource for algorithmic evaluation in diverse image‐based applications, including classification and object detection. The latest big data cup, Optimized Road Damage Detection Challenge (ORDDC'2024), is also based on RDD2022, underscoring its continued relevance and pivotal role in current research and development endeavors.

The rapid development of self-driving vehicles requires integrating a sophisticated sensing system to address the various obstacles posed by road traffic efficiently. While several datasets are available to support object detection in autonomous vehicles, it is crucial to carefully evaluate the suitability of these datasets for different weather conditions across the globe. In response to this requirement, we present a novel dataset named the Canadian Vehicle Datasets (CVD). Subsequently, we present deep learning models that use this dataset. The CVD comprises street-level videos which were recorded by Thales, Canada. These videos were collected with high-quality cameras mounted on a vehicle in the Canadian province of Quebec. The recordings were made during daytime and nighttime, capturing weather conditions such as hazy, snowy, rainy, gloomy, nighttime and sunny days. A total of 10000 images of vehicles and other road assets are extracted from the collected videos. A total of 8388 images were annotated with corresponding generated labels 27766 with their respective 11 different classes. We analyzed the performance of the YOLOv8 model trained using the existing RoboFlow dataset. Then, we compared it with the model trained on the expanded version of RoboFlow using the proposed weather-specific dataset, CVD. Final values of improved accuracy of 73.26 %, 72.84 %, and 73.47 % (Precision/Recall/mAP) were reported upon adding the proposed dataset. Finally, the model trained on this diverse dataset exhibits heightened robustness and proves highly beneficial for both autonomous and conventional vehicle operations, making it applicable not only in Canada but also in other countries with comparable weather conditions.

This paper summarizes the Optimized Road Damage Detection Challenge (ORDDC’2024), a Big Data Cup featured at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2024. Building on previous competitions, ORDDC’2024 aims to enhance the automatic detection and classification of road damage from images. It introduces two novel contributions: first, a standardized platform for model deployment that ensured consistent performance evaluation across all participants; second, an emphasis on inference speed as a critical evaluation criterion to meet the growing demand for real-time applications in infrastructure monitoring. The competition utilized the road damage dataset, RDD2022, released through the Crowdsensing-based Road Damage Detection Challenge CRDDC’2022, comprising road images from majorly 6 countries: India, Japan, Czech Republic, Norway, United States, and China. Attracting participants from 19 countries, the challenge yielded 76,069 submissions in Phase 1 and 353 in Phase 2. The winning model offers two solutions: one optimized for accuracy, achieving a peak F1-score of 86.18% at an inference speed of 136.41 milliseconds per image, and another optimized for speed, delivering 26.8 milliseconds per image with an F1-score of 79.27%. This paper analyzes leading solutions and challenges faced, providing insights for enhancing real-time road damage detection and improving global infrastructure maintenance strategies.