Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study

Manhole covers are crucial for maintaining urban operations and ensuring residents’ travel. The traditional inspection and maintenance management system based on manual judgment has low efficiency and poor accuracy, making it difficult to adapt to the rapidly expanding urban construction and complex...

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Main Authors: Yanqiong Ding, Baojiang Han, Hua Jiang, Hao Hu, Lei Xue, Jiasen Weng, Zhili Tang, Yuzhang Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:Sensors
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/13/4144
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author Yanqiong Ding
Baojiang Han
Hua Jiang
Hao Hu
Lei Xue
Jiasen Weng
Zhili Tang
Yuzhang Liu
author_facet Yanqiong Ding
Baojiang Han
Hua Jiang
Hao Hu
Lei Xue
Jiasen Weng
Zhili Tang
Yuzhang Liu
author_sort Yanqiong Ding
collection DOAJ
description Manhole covers are crucial for maintaining urban operations and ensuring residents’ travel. The traditional inspection and maintenance management system based on manual judgment has low efficiency and poor accuracy, making it difficult to adapt to the rapidly expanding urban construction and complex environment of manhole covers. To address these challenges, an intelligent management model based on the improved YOLOv8 model is proposed for three types of urban high-frequency defects: “breakage, loss and shift”. We design a lightweight dual-stream feature extraction network and use EfficientNetV2 as the backbone. By introducing the fused MBConv structure, the computational complexity is significantly reduced, while the efficiency of feature extraction is improved. An innovative foreground attention module is introduced to adaptively enhance the features of manhole cover defects, improving the model’s ability to identify defects of various scales. In addition, an optimized feature fusion architecture is constructed by integrating NAS-FPN modules. This structure utilizes bidirectional feature transfer and automatic structure search, significantly enhancing the expressiveness of multi-scale features. A combined loss function design using GIoU loss, dynamically weighted BCE loss, and Distribution Focal Loss (DFL) is adopted to address the issues of sample imbalance and inter-class differences. The experimental results show that the model achieved excellent performance in multiple indicators of manhole cover defect recognition, especially in classification accuracy, recall rate, and F1-score, with an overall recognition accuracy of 98.6%. The application of the improved model in the new smart management system for urban manhole covers can significantly improve management efficiency.
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spelling doaj-art-3acedaab63e143cfb7dba671ef0a50ec2025-08-20T02:36:30ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202025-07-012513414410.3390/s25134144Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case StudyYanqiong Ding0Baojiang Han1Hua Jiang2Hao Hu3Lei Xue4Jiasen Weng5Zhili Tang6Yuzhang Liu7Beijing Information Infrastructure Construction Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, ChinaBeijing Information Infrastructure Construction Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, ChinaSchool of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 100083, ChinaSchool of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 100083, ChinaBeijing Information Infrastructure Construction Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, ChinaSchool of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 100083, ChinaBeijing Information Infrastructure Construction Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, ChinaBeijing Information Infrastructure Construction Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, ChinaManhole covers are crucial for maintaining urban operations and ensuring residents’ travel. The traditional inspection and maintenance management system based on manual judgment has low efficiency and poor accuracy, making it difficult to adapt to the rapidly expanding urban construction and complex environment of manhole covers. To address these challenges, an intelligent management model based on the improved YOLOv8 model is proposed for three types of urban high-frequency defects: “breakage, loss and shift”. We design a lightweight dual-stream feature extraction network and use EfficientNetV2 as the backbone. By introducing the fused MBConv structure, the computational complexity is significantly reduced, while the efficiency of feature extraction is improved. An innovative foreground attention module is introduced to adaptively enhance the features of manhole cover defects, improving the model’s ability to identify defects of various scales. In addition, an optimized feature fusion architecture is constructed by integrating NAS-FPN modules. This structure utilizes bidirectional feature transfer and automatic structure search, significantly enhancing the expressiveness of multi-scale features. A combined loss function design using GIoU loss, dynamically weighted BCE loss, and Distribution Focal Loss (DFL) is adopted to address the issues of sample imbalance and inter-class differences. The experimental results show that the model achieved excellent performance in multiple indicators of manhole cover defect recognition, especially in classification accuracy, recall rate, and F1-score, with an overall recognition accuracy of 98.6%. The application of the improved model in the new smart management system for urban manhole covers can significantly improve management efficiency.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/13/4144manhole covermodel improvementlightweight networkattention modulemulti-scale feature fusion
spellingShingle Yanqiong Ding
Baojiang Han
Hua Jiang
Hao Hu
Lei Xue
Jiasen Weng
Zhili Tang
Yuzhang Liu
Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
Sensors
manhole cover
model improvement
lightweight network
attention module
multi-scale feature fusion
title Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
title_full Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
title_fullStr Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
title_full_unstemmed Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
title_short Application of Improved YOLOv8 Image Model in Urban Manhole Cover Defect Management and Detection: Case Study
title_sort application of improved yolov8 image model in urban manhole cover defect management and detection case study
topic manhole cover
model improvement
lightweight network
attention module
multi-scale feature fusion
url https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/13/4144
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