This study establishes an artificial intelligence (AI) model for detecting pothole on asphalt pavement surface. Image processing methods including Gaussian filter, steerable filter, and integral projection are utilized for extracting features from digital images. A data set consisting of 200 image samples has been collected to train and validate the predictive performance of two machine learning algorithms including the least squares support vector machine (LS‐SVM) and the artificial neural network (ANN). Experimental results obtained from a repeated subsampling process with 20 runs show that both LS‐SVM and ANN are capable methods for pothole detection with classification accuracy rate larger than 85%. In addition, the LS‐SVM has achieved the highest classification accuracy rate (roughly 89%) and the area under the curve (0.96). Accordingly, the proposed AI approach used with LS‐SVM can be very potential to assist transportation agencies and road inspectors in the task of pavement pothole detection.