YOLO-ROC: A High-Precision and Ultra-Lightweight Model for Real-Time Road Damage Detection

Road damage detection is a critical task for ensuring traffic safety and maintaining infrastructure integrity. While deep learning-based detection methods are now widely adopted, they still face two core challenges: first, the inadequate multi-scale feature extraction capabilities of existing networks for diverse targets like cracks and potholes, leading to high miss rates for small-scale damage; and second, the substantial parameter counts and computational demands of mainstream models, which hinder their deployment for efficient, real-time detection in practical applications. To address these issues, this paper proposes a high-precision and lightweight model, YOLO - Road Orthogonal Compact (YOLO-ROC). We designed a Bidirectional Multi-scale Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast (BMS-SPPF) module to enhance multi-scale feature extraction and implemented a hierarchical channel compression strategy to reduce computational complexity. The BMS-SPPF module leverages a bidirectional spatial-channel attention mechanism to improve the detection of small targets. Concurrently, the channel compression strategy reduces the parameter count from 3.01M to 0.89M and GFLOPs from 8.1 to 2.6. Experiments on the RDD2022_China_Drone dataset demonstrate that YOLO-ROC achieves a mAP50 of 67.6%, surpassing the baseline YOLOv8n by 2.11%. Notably, the mAP50 for the small-target D40 category improved by 16.8%, and the final model size is only 2.0 MB. Furthermore, the model exhibits excellent generalization performance on the RDD2022_China_Motorbike dataset.