Automatic assessment of pavement distresses-a past experience

The Pavement Distress Assessment (PDA) is an essential phenomenon in Pavement Management System (PMS) which is used to provide the sufficient information for making consistent and more cost-beneficial decisions for safe and comfortable road management. The collection of distress-data is a great challenge to the pavement engineers. The distress data can be collected using either ground-manual surveys or automatic assessing techniques. The present article focused on automatic assessment of pavement distresses using Digital Image Processing. Initially, the different image-acquisition systems are presented and discussed. Later, the image processing techniques for classifying and quantifying the different pavement distresses such as alligator cracking, potholes, raveling, bleeding and rutting etcetera. Finally, the choice and status of available techniques are summarized.