Manhole Cover Classification Based on Super-Resolution Reconstruction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Aerial Imagery

Urban underground pipeline networks are a key component of urban infrastructure, and a large number of older urban areas lack information about their underground pipelines. In addition, survey methods for underground pipelines are often time-consuming and labor-intensive. While the manhole cover serves as the hub connecting the underground pipe network with the ground, the generation of underground pipe network can be realized by obtaining the location and category information of the manhole cover. Therefore, this paper proposed a manhole cover detection method based on UAV aerial photography to obtain ground images, using image super-resolution reconstruction and image positioning and classification. Firstly, the urban image was obtained by UAV aerial photography, and then the YOLOv8 object detection technology was used to accurately locate the manhole cover. Next, the SRGAN network was used to perform super-resolution processing on the manhole cover text to improve the clarity of the recognition image. Finally, the clear manhole cover text image was input into the VGG16_BN network to realize the manhole cover classification. The experimental results showed that the manhole cover classification accuracy of this paper's method reached 97.62%, which verified its effectiveness in manhole cover detection. The method significantly reduces the time and labor cost and provides a new method for manhole cover information acquisition.