Timely and accurate detection of pavement cracks, the most common type of road damage, is essential for ensuring road safety. Automatic image segmentation of cracks can accurately locate their pixel positions. This paper proposes a Multi-Scale Feature Enhanced U-shaped Network (MFE-UNet) for pavement crack detection. This network model uses a Residual Detail-Enhanced Block (RDEB) instead of a conventional convolution in the encoder–decoder process. The block combines Efficient Multi-Scale Attention to enhance its feature extraction performance. The Multi-Scale Gating Feature Fusion (MGFF) is incorporated into the skip connections, enhancing the fusion of multi-scale features to capture finer crack details while maintaining rich semantic information. Furthermore, we created a pavement crack image dataset named China_MCrack, consisting of 1500 images collected from road surfaces using smartphone-mounted motorbikes. The proposed network was trained and tested on the China_MCrack, DeepCrack, and Crack-Forest datasets, with additional generalization experiments on the BochumCrackDataset. The results were compared with those of the U-Net model, ResUNet, and Attention U-Net. The experimental results show that the proposed MFE-UNet model achieves accuracies of 82.95%, 91.71%, and 69.02% on three datasets, namely, China_MCrack, DeepCrack, and Crack-Forest datasets, respectively, and the F1_score is improved by 1–4% compared with other networks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in detecting cracks at the pixel level.

To address the issue of missing feature information for small objects caused by the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds, as well as the poor detection performance on small objects due to their weak feature representation, this paper proposes a multi-modal 3D object detection method based on an improved PointPillars framework. First, LiDAR point clouds are fused with camera images at the data level, incorporating 2D semantic information to enhance small-object feature representation. Second, a Pillar-wise Channel Attention (PCA) module is introduced to emphasize critical features before converting pillar features into pseudo-image representations. Additionally, a Spatial Attention Module (SAM) is embedded into the backbone network to enhance spatial feature representation. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, compared with the baseline PointPillars, the proposed method significantly improves small-object detection performance. Specifically, under the bird’s-eye view (BEV) evaluation metrics, the Average Precision (AP) for pedestrians and cyclists increases by 7.06% and 3.08%, respectively; under the 3D evaluation metrics, these improvements are 4.36% and 2.58%. Compared with existing methods, the improved model also achieves relatively higher accuracy in detecting small objects. Visualization results further demonstrate the enhanced detection capability of the proposed method for small objects with different difficulty levels. Overall, the proposed approach effectively improves 3D object detection performance, particularly for small objects, in complex autonomous driving scenarios.