Accidents have contributed a lot to the loss of lives of motorists and serious damage to vehicles around the globe. Potholes are the major cause of these accidents. It is very important to build a model that will help in recognizing these potholes on vehicles. Several object detection models based on deep learning and computer vision were developed to detect these potholes. It is very important to develop a lightweight model with high accuracy and detection speed. In this study, we employed a Mask RCNN model with ResNet-50 and MobileNetv1 as the backbone to improve detection, and also compared the performance of the proposed Mask RCNN based on original training images and the images that were filtered using a Gaussian smoothing filter. It was observed that the ResNet trained on Gaussian filtered images outperformed all the employed models.
Keywords: Gaussian filter; Mask RCNN; computer vision; object detection; pothole; smart cities.