Axle count in trucks is important to the classification of vehicles and to the operation of road systems, and is used in the determination of service fees and 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. Training was done on different base models, to increase training time efficiency and to compare results. We evaluated results based on three metrics: 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. Dataset and codes are publicly available for download.
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