Leandro Arab Marcomini

Leandro Arab Marcomini, André Luiz Cunha

Axle count in trucks is important to the classification of vehicles and to the operation of road systems. It is used in the determination of service fees and in the impact on the pavement. Although axle count can be achieved with traditional methods, such as manual labor, it is increasingly possible to count axles using deep learning and computer vision methods. This paper aims to compare three deep-learning object detection algorithms, YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, for the detection of truck axles. A dataset was built to provide training and testing examples for the neural networks. The training was done on different base models, to increase training time efficiency and to compare results. We evaluated results based on five metrics: precision, recall, mAP, F1-score, and FPS count. Results indicate that YOLO and SSD have similar accuracy and performance, with more than 96\% mAP for both models. Datasets and codes are publicly available for download.

Leandro Arab Marcomini, Andre Luiz Cunha

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) traditionally require large amounts of data to train models with good performance. However, data collection is an expensive process, both in time and resources. Generated synthetic images are a good alternative, with video games producing realistic 3D models. This paper aims to determine whether images extracted from a video game can be effectively used to train a CNN to detect real-life truck axles. Three different databases were created, with real-life and synthetic trucks, to provide training and testing examples for three different You Only Look Once (YOLO) architectures. Results were evaluated based on four metrics: recall, precision, F1-score, and mean Average Precision (mAP). To evaluate the statistical significance of the results, the Mann-Whitney U test was also applied to the resulting mAP of all models. Synthetic images from trucks extracted from a video game proved to be a reliable source of training data, contributing to the performance of all networks. The highest mAP score reached 99\%. Results indicate that synthetic images can be used to train neural networks, providing a reliable, low-cost data source for extracting knowledge.