# Automated Road Distress Detection Using Vision Transformersand Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13145/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The American Society of Civil Engineers has graded Americas infrastructure condition as a C, with the road system receiving a dismal D. Roads are vital to regional economic viability, yet their management, maintenance, and repair processes remain inefficient, relying on outdated manual or laser-based inspection methods that are both costly and time-consuming. With the increasing availability of real-time visual data from autonomous vehicles, there is an opportunity to apply computer vision (CV) methods for advanced road monitoring, providing insights to guide infrastructure rehabilitation efforts. This project explores the use of state-of-the-art CV techniques for road distress segmentation. It begins by evaluating synthetic data generated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to assess its usefulness for model training. The study then applies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for road distress segmentation and subsequently examines the transformer-based model MaskFormer. Results show that GAN-generated data improves model performance and that MaskFormer outperforms the CNN model in two metrics: mAP50 and IoU.