| Summary: | This paper aims to explore and evaluate aerial imagery and deep learning technology in pavement condition evaluation. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model, named <i>PCIer</i>, was designed to process aerial images and produce pavement condition index (PCI) estimations, which are classified into four scales of Good (PCI ≥ 70), Fair (50 ≤ PCI < 70), Poor (25 ≤ PCI < 50), and Very Poor (PCI < 25). In the experiment, the PCI datasets were retrieved from the published pavement condition report by the City of Sacramento, CA. Following the retrieved datasets, the authors also collected the corresponding aerial image datasets containing 100 images for each PCI grade from Google Earth. An 80% proportion of datasets were used for <i>PCIer</i> model training, and the remaining were used for testing. Comparisons showed using a 128-channel heatmap layer in the proposed <i>PCIer</i> model and saving the <i>PCIer</i> model with the best validation accuracy would yield the best performance, with a testing accuracy of 0.97, and a weighted average precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.98, 0.97, and 0.97, respectively. Moreover, future research recommendations are provided in the discussion for improving the effectiveness of pavement evaluation via aerial imagery and deep learning.
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