Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Pavement Cracks Based on 3D Pavement Images

Pavement cracking is a significant symptom of pavement deterioration and deficiency. Conventional manual inspections of road condition are gradually replaced by novel automated inspection systems. As a result, a great amount of pavement surface information is digitized by these systems with a high resolution. With pavement surface data, pavement cracks can be detected using crack detection algorithms. In this paper, a fully automated algorithm for segmenting and enhancing pavement crack is proposed, which consists of four major procedures. First, a preprocessing procedure is employed to remove spurious noise and rectify the original 3D pavement data. Second, crack saliency maps are segmented from 3D pavement data using steerable matched filter bank. Third, 2D tensor voting is applied to crack saliency maps to achieve better curve continuity of crack structure and higher accuracy. Finally, postprocessing procedures are used to remove redundant noises. The proposed procedures were evaluated over 200 asphalt pavement images with diverse cracks. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method showed a high performance and could achieve average precision of 88.38%, recall of 93.15%, and F-measure of 90.68%, respectively. Accordingly, the proposed approach can be helpful in automated pavement condition assessment.