Roadway pavement surface distress information is critical for effective pavement asset management, and subsequently, transportation management agencies at all levels (i.e., federal, state, and local) dedicate a large amount of time and money to routinely evaluate pavement surface distress conditions as the core of their asset management programs. However, currently adopted ground-based evaluati...

Road pavement maintenance today relies mainly on manual pavement condition inspection and distress rating; however, this manual method is costly, labour-intensive, time-consuming, and dangerous to inspectors and may affect traffic flows. Moreover, such method is very subjective and may have a high degree of variability, being unable to provide meaningful information. Additionally, since using t...

A fundamental component of computer-based video image analysis for pavement distress evaluation is identification of the type of distress from geometric and textural properties of an area of interest identified during image analysis. This study describes the algorithms used to identi_fy and classify the most common pavement distress types once a possible distress region is identified on an imag...

This paper presents a fuzzy-based system that is used for maintenance planning of road pavements. The system has been developed based on knowledge elicitation from experienced maintenance engineers using fuzzy logic. The system includes functions for pavement condition and deterioration prediction, feasible treatment assessment in each pavement section, and maintenance planning in a road networ...

Many agencies use the AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures to design their pavement systems. The limitation inherent in this method is the empirical nature of the decision process, which was derived from a road test conducted almost 45 years ago in Ottawa, Illinois. The newly released Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), based on NCHRP Study 1-37A, has adopted a mechan...

The vast amount of data generated by automated surface distress evaluation equipment far exceeds the storage capabilities of current digital data storage systems. A study using fractals is being carried out to alleviate the data storage problem, since fractal image compression offers the largest compression ratio of the available image compression algorithms. This paper discusses the use of fra...

An accurate and regular survey of the road surface distresses is a key factor for pavement rehabilitation design and management, allowing public managers to maximize the value of the continuously limited budgets for road improvements and maintenance. Manual pavement distress surveys are labor-intensive, expensive and unsafe for highly-trafficked highways. Over the years, automated surveys using...

The three major distress conditions affecting the performance of asphalt pavements are permanent deformation or rutting, fatigue or load associated cracking, and low temperature or thermal cracking. In an earlier technical topics article (Fall, 1998), we examined the causes of fatigue cracking and the importance of good compaction during construction to help minimize this type of distress. In t...

The focus of the current project funded by MIOH-UTC for the period 9/1/2010-8/31/2011 is to enhance our earlier effort in providing a more robust image processing based pavement distress detection and classification system. During the last few decades, many efforts have been made to produce automatic inspection systems to meet the specific requirements in assessing distress on the road surfaces...

Assessment of pavement distresses is one of the important parts of pavement management systems to adopt the most effective road maintenance strategy. In the last decade, extensive studies have been done to develop automated systems for pavement distress processing based on machine vision techniques. One of the most important structural components of computer vision is the feature extraction met...