Automated Visual Inspection of Pavement Crack Detection and Characterization

Crack detection in road pavements and objects has been a constant field of research in pavement management. Conventionally, humans were engaged to detect cracks in the pavements and they used to present report sheets based on their assessment. But, this process was a time consuming one and was costlier too. So, researchers were trying for minimizing the human involvement and at the same time detecting the cracks precisely. This gave way to numerous automated techniques for the detection of cracks. In this paper, an automated technique to detect cracks in road pavements by means of digital image processing is proposed. Some conditions such as complex texture, bad illumination, and non-uniform background in images may influence the accuracy of the automatic system. In this novel methodology propose a automated detection of crack area in the road pavement from the road surface video footage. First, the images are processed by gray scale morphological processing. Subsequently, then the result is obtained by filtering the images and then applying the edge detection operators. Finally by applying shape based image retrieval algorithm, the particular defective area can be retrieved. These are simulated through computer software tool using MATLAB VERSION 7.9.