# Robust Video-Based Pothole Detection and Area Estimation for Intelligent Vehicles with Depth Map and Kalman Smoothing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [On the Integration of Self-Attention and Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14556/) (2021)
- [Computer Vision for Road Imaging and Pothole Detection: A State-of-the-Art Review of Systems and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13590/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Pothole Detection Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06356/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Road potholes pose a serious threat to driving safety and comfort, making their detection and assessment a critical task in fields such as autonomous driving. When driving vehicles, the operators usually avoid large potholes and approach smaller ones at reduced speeds to ensure safety. Therefore, accurately estimating pothole area is of vital importance. Most existing vision-based methods rely on distance priors to construct geometric models. However, their performance is susceptible to variations in camera angles and typically relies on the assumption of a flat road surface, potentially leading to significant errors in complex real-world environments. To address these problems, a robust pothole area estimation framework that integrates object detection and monocular depth estimation in a video stream is proposed in this paper. First, to enhance pothole feature extraction and improve the detection of small potholes, ACSH-YOLOv8 is proposed with ACmix module and the small object detection head. Then, the BoT-SORT algorithm is utilized for pothole tracking, while DepthAnything V2 generates depth maps for each frame. With the obtained depth maps and potholes labels, a novel Minimum Bounding Triangulated Pixel (MBTP) method is proposed for pothole area estimation. Finally, Kalman Filter based on Confidence and Distance (CDKF) is developed to maintain consistency of estimation results across consecutive frames. The results show that ACSH-YOLOv8 model achieves an AP(50) of 76.6%, representing a 7.6% improvement over YOLOv8. Through CDKF optimization across consecutive frames, pothole predictions become more robust, thereby enhancing the method's practical applicability.