Focusing on the problems of the large time consumption of manual detection and the insufficient precision of the current detection methods of elongated pavement distress， a two-stage elongated pavement distress detection method， named Epd RCNN （Elongated pavement distress Region-based Convolutional Neural Network）， which could accurately locate and classify the distress was proposed according to the weak semantic characteristics and abnormal geometric properties of the distress. Firstly， for the weak semantic characteristics of elongated pavement distress， a backbone network that reused low-level features and repeatedly fused the features of different stages was proposed. Secondly， in the training process， the high-quality positive samples for network training were generated by the anchor box mechanism conforming to the geometric property distribution of the distress. Then， the distress bounding boxes were predicted on a single high-resolution feature map， and a parallel cascaded dilated convolution module was used to this feature map to improve its multi-scale feature representation ability. Finally， for different shapes of region proposals， the region proposal features conforming to the distress geometric properties were extracted by the proposal feature improvement module composed of deformable Region of Interest Pooling （RoI Pooling） and spatial attention module. Experimental results show that the proposed method has the mean Average Precision （mAP） of 0.907 on images with sufficient illumination， the mAP of 0.891 on images with illumination problems and the comprehensive mAP of 0.899， indicating that the proposed method has good detection performance and robustness to illumination.