Automated distress evaluation

The Automated distress collection systems have been developed over the years to evaluate the condition of road pavements. The simplest method is to have a person riding or walking along the road and visually evaluate it. However, at network level, there are a number of problems with this approach, related to the total length of roads that need to be surveyed. Automated systems have been developed in an attempt to make the evaluation procedure more consistent. This paper deals with an automated system of survey and evaluation of road pavement distresses, studied in a research program for the preparation of a Mobile Mapping System. The vehicle was equipped to survey the geometric characteristic of road for the realization of cadastre. The acquisition of the images of the pavement can be realized during the collection of images for the cadastre, by means of an added line scan on the vehicle. The distress degree can be estimated in a completely automatic way on these images. In the process of asset management, the appraisal of the pavement conditions represents one of the aspects more important in a pavement management system. The automatic survey and evaluation of pavement distresses are still a relatively new technology for which an official protocol does not exist yet. The studied methodology represents a fast and inexpensive instrument to survey the condition of the pavement at network level. A pavement condition indicator can be defined from the images: the Unified Crack Index (UCI). UCI is valuated completely automatically, without man work. This method eliminates the subjective and arbitrary nature of the evaluations due to human nature, but it eliminates the experience that only a prepared operator has. Therefore, the system gives the chance to interact with semi-automatic systems if the results of the automatic valuation need a deepening.