Abstract:In response to the challenges of complex road conditions, difficult real-time detection, and issues such as missing detections and false negatives in road distress detection, a multi-type road distress dataset named R-CRACK was collected and created. Based on the YOLOv5s model, lightweight GSConv modules were used to replace some standard convolutions in the Neck module to construct a lightweight network neck. In the Head module, SimSPPF was applied to improve the spatial pyramid pooling method, and a lightweight upsampling operator CARAFE was utilized, resulting in the GSC-YOLO model. The GSC-YOLO model was trained on a portion of the training set of the R-CRACK dataset using rectangle inference, image weighting, and label smoothing techniques. The results of the trained model show that compared to the base YOLOv5s model, the GSC-YOLO model reduces parameters by 6.8%, computation by 4.8%, and improves mAP(@.5) by 9.2%. The improved network models were used to detect road distress in both single and complex environments. By comparing the detection results of different models, it was demonstrated that the GSC-YOLO model improves upon the shortcomings of YOLOv5s in terms of missing detections and false negatives. This type of lightweight detection network is of significant importance for solving road distress detection.