Detection of cracks in paved road surface using laser scan image data

Abstract

In the current study, we developed a methodology for detecting cracks in the surface of paved road using 3D digital surface model of road created by measuring with three-dimensional laser scanner which works on the basis of the light-section method automatically. For the detection of cracks from the imagery data of the model, the background subtraction method (Rolling Ball Background Subtraction Algorithm) was applied to the data for filtering out the background noise originating from the undulation and gradual slope and also for filtering the ruts that were caused by wearing, aging and excessive use of road and other reasons. We confirmed the influence from the difference in height (depth) caused by forgoing reasons included in a data can be reduced significantl y at this stage. Various parameters of ball radius were applied for checking how the result of data obtained with this process vary according to the change of parameter and it becomes clear that there are not important differences by the change of parameters if they are in a certain range radius. And then, image segmentation was performed by multi-resolution segmentation based on the object-based image analysis technique. The parameters for the image segmentation, scale, pixel value (height/depth) and the compactness of objects were used. For the classification of cracks in the database, the height, length and other geometric property are used and we confirmed the method is useful for the detection of cracks in a paved road surface.