YOLO26-RD: An End-to-End Road Damage Detection Network With Learnable Contrast Enhancement and Edge-Guided Downsampling
Pavement distress detectors are conventionally specialised for small objects, typically by adding a stride-4 detection head and replacing strided convolution with space-to-depth downsampling. This paper tests that premise against the annotation geometry of region level survey imagery and finds it fails: 1.28% of instances are small at 640 resolution while 70.37% are large, yet a stride-4 level would claim 75.3% of anchors, and complete misses rather than localisation errors dominate baseline failures. YOLO26-RD therefore reallocates the anchor budget, retaining the stride-4 branch as neck features but carrying no detection level there, and adds LearnableContrast, a 494 parameter per tile ...
| Authors | Sompote Youwai, Pawarotorn Chaipetch, Hathairat Samaikul et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 16 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.