June Moh Goo

Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Zichao Zeng, June Moh Goo et al.

Road safety assessments are critical yet costly, especially in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), where most roads remain unrated. Traditional methods require expert annotation and training data, while supervised learning-based approaches struggle to generalise across regions. In this paper, we introduce \textit{V-RoAst}, a zero-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) framework using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to classify road safety attributes defined by the iRAP standard. We introduce the first open-source dataset from ThaiRAP, consisting of over 2,000 curated street-level images from Thailand annotated for this task. We evaluate Gemini-1.5-flash and GPT-4o-mini on this dataset and benchmark their performance against VGGNet and ResNet baselines. While VLMs underperform on spatial awareness, they generalise well to unseen classes and offer flexible prompt-based reasoning without retraining. Our results show that VLMs can serve as automatic road assessment tools when integrated with complementary data. This work is the first to explore VLMs for zero-shot infrastructure risk assessment and opens new directions for automatic, low-cost road safety mapping. Code and dataset: https://github.com/PongNJ/V-RoAst.

June Moh Goo, Xenios Milidonis, Alessandro Artusi et al.

Detecting and segmenting cracks in infrastructure, such as roads and buildings, is crucial for safety and cost-effective maintenance. In spite of the potential of deep learning, there are challenges in achieving precise results and handling diverse crack types. With the proposed dataset and model, we aim to enhance crack detection and infrastructure maintenance. We introduce Hybrid-Segmentor, an encoder-decoder based approach that is capable of extracting both fine-grained local and global crack features. This allows the model to improve its generalization capabilities in distinguish various type of shapes, surfaces and sizes of cracks. To keep the computational performances low for practical purposes, while maintaining the high the generalization capabilities of the model, we incorporate a self-attention model at the encoder level, while reducing the complexity of the decoder component. The proposed model outperforms existing benchmark models across 5 quantitative metrics (accuracy 0.971, precision 0.804, recall 0.744, F1-score 0.770, and IoU score 0.630), achieving state-of-the-art status.