Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sahoo, Rishi Raj, Mohanty, Surbhi Saswati, Mishra, Subhankar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10945
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913060574199808
author Sahoo, Rishi Raj
Mohanty, Surbhi Saswati
Mishra, Subhankar
author_facet Sahoo, Rishi Raj
Mohanty, Surbhi Saswati
Mishra, Subhankar
contents Potholes on the roads are a serious hazard and maintenance burden. This poses a significant threat to road safety and vehicle longevity, especially on the diverse and under-maintained roads of India. In this paper, we present a complete end-to-end system called iWatchRoad for automated pothole detection, Global Positioning System (GPS) tagging, and real time mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM). We curated a large, self-annotated dataset of over 7,000 frames captured across various road types, lighting conditions, and weather scenarios unique to Indian environments, leveraging dashcam footage. This dataset is used to fine-tune, Ultralytics You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to perform real time pothole detection, while a custom Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module was employed to extract timestamps directly from video frames. The timestamps are synchronized with GPS logs to geotag each detected potholes accurately. The processed data includes the potholes' details and frames as metadata is stored in a database and visualized via a user friendly web interface using OSM. iWatchRoad not only improves detection accuracy under challenging conditions but also provides government compatible outputs for road assessment and maintenance planning through the metadata visible on the website. Our solution is cost effective, hardware efficient, and scalable, offering a practical tool for urban and rural road management in developing regions, making the system automated. iWatchRoad is available at https://smlab.niser.ac.in/project/iwatchroad
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10945
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle iWatchRoad: Scalable Detection and Geospatial Visualization of Potholes for Smart Cities
Sahoo, Rishi Raj
Mohanty, Surbhi Saswati
Mishra, Subhankar
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Potholes on the roads are a serious hazard and maintenance burden. This poses a significant threat to road safety and vehicle longevity, especially on the diverse and under-maintained roads of India. In this paper, we present a complete end-to-end system called iWatchRoad for automated pothole detection, Global Positioning System (GPS) tagging, and real time mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM). We curated a large, self-annotated dataset of over 7,000 frames captured across various road types, lighting conditions, and weather scenarios unique to Indian environments, leveraging dashcam footage. This dataset is used to fine-tune, Ultralytics You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to perform real time pothole detection, while a custom Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module was employed to extract timestamps directly from video frames. The timestamps are synchronized with GPS logs to geotag each detected potholes accurately. The processed data includes the potholes' details and frames as metadata is stored in a database and visualized via a user friendly web interface using OSM. iWatchRoad not only improves detection accuracy under challenging conditions but also provides government compatible outputs for road assessment and maintenance planning through the metadata visible on the website. Our solution is cost effective, hardware efficient, and scalable, offering a practical tool for urban and rural road management in developing regions, making the system automated. iWatchRoad is available at https://smlab.niser.ac.in/project/iwatchroad
title iWatchRoad: Scalable Detection and Geospatial Visualization of Potholes for Smart Cities
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10945