Nowadays, the construction, monitoring, quality control, and maintenance of roads always require high-precision, easy-to-use measuring devices in the field. This study develops an embedded computer program using the YOLOv8 model integrated into a smart road length measuring device to detect road surface cracks. First, the study analyzes and clarifies the outstanding points of the YOLOv8 model, including anchor-free: Eliminates the use of traditional anchor boxes, helping to simplify the training process, increase accuracy and reduce computational costs; C2f (Cross-Stage Partial with feature fusion); Replacing CSSPLayer in YOLOv5, this module improves feature extraction and maintains good computational performance; SPFF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling - Fast): Helps expand the receptive field without increasing computational costs, supporting object recognition at multiple scales; PAN++: Enhances the transfer of features from lower layers to the output, helping to detect small objects such as cracks well. Then, this work evaluated the performance of the proposed model by applying YOLOv8 on the surface crack dataset taken from the open-source Roboflow Universe. The results showed that the developed YOLOv8 model achieved good results with the recall indexes of 57.3%, mAP50 59.3%, precision of 64.4% mAP50-95 48.9% for YOLOv8n model, and can improve the accuracy further, reaching 79.8% using the YOLOv8m model, while still meeting the real-time processing speed of the device. These experimental results using the YOLOv8 model for detecting cracks on DongAnh road, Hanoi, Vietnam, confirm the possibility of applying the integrated road crack detection model on smart road length measuring devices in practice, achieved a precision of 43.3%, supporting the survey, inspection, supervision, construction and management of traffic infrastructure more scientifically and effectively
