Journey into Automation: Image-Derived Pavement Texture Extraction and Evaluation
This provides an incremental solution for road safety by automating pavement quality evaluation for transportation engineers.
The study developed an automated system to extract pavement texture features and predict mean texture depth (MTD) from images, achieving high accuracy with an R2 of 0.9858 and relative errors below 10% in field tests.
Mean texture depth (MTD) is pivotal in assessing the skid resistance of asphalt pavements and ensuring road safety. This study focuses on developing an automated system for extracting texture features and evaluating MTD based on pavement images. The contributions of this work are threefold: firstly, it proposes an economical method to acquire three-dimensional (3D) pavement texture data; secondly, it enhances 3D image processing techniques and formulates features that represent various aspects of texture; thirdly, it establishes multivariate prediction models that link these features with MTD values. Validation results demonstrate that the Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) model achieves remarkable prediction stability and accuracy (R2 = 0.9858), and field tests indicate the superiority of the proposed method over other techniques, with relative errors below 10%. This method offers a comprehensive end-to-end solution for pavement quality evaluation, from images input to MTD predictions output.