Research on damage detection of road surfaces using image processing techniques has been actively conducted, achieving considerably high detection accuracies. So far, most studies focused only on the detection of the presence or absence of damages; however, in real-world scenarios, road managers from need to clearly understand the type of damage and its extent in order to take effective action in advance or to allocate the necessary resources. Moreover, currently there are few uniform and openly available road damage datasets available, leading to a lack of a common benchmark for road damage detection. Such dataset could be used for a great variety of applications; herein, it is intended to serve as the acquisition component of a physical asset management tool which can aid governments agencies for planning purposes, or by infrastructure maintenance companies, so they can implement predictive maintenance procedures.In this paper, we make two contributions to address these issues. First, we present a large-scale road damage dataset, which includes a more balanced and representative set of damages not present in previous studies. This dataset is composed of 18,0345 road damage images captured with a smartphone installed on a car, with 45,435 instances road surface damages (linear, lateral and alligator cracks, potholes, and various types of painting blurs). In order to generate this dataset, we obtained images from several public datasets and augmented it with crowdsourced images, which where manually annotated for further processing. The images were captured under a variety of weather and illumination conditions. In each image, we annotated the bounding box representing the location and type of damage and its extent. Second, we trained different types generic object detection methods, both traditional (an LBP-cascaded classifier) and deep learning-based, specifically, MobileNet and RetinaNet, which are amenable for embedded and mobile and implementations with an acceptable performance for many applications. We compared the accuracy and inference time of all these models with others in the state of the art, achieving higher accuracies in all the eight classes present in the dataset introduced by researchers at the University of Tokyo, and in other related works, with a lower inference time.