Distributed sensing and assessment of visual surface conditions for regional road networks

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Markus König, since 1/2017
• Subject Area: Structural Engineering, Building Informatics and Construction Operation ; City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2013 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233324858

In recent years, the condition of regional road networks has rapidly decreased. In order to establish an efficient maintenance management, area-wide and economic pavement condition assessment is essential. The application of existing dedicated vehicles is not convenient due to their size, the enormous network length of regional roads and the resulting tremendous amount of data. The objective of this research is to develop and verify a concept for distributed sensing and assessment of visual conditions of regional asphalt road networks. A mobile network of common passenger vehicles equipped with a backup camera, GPS and Internet access is used to capture area-wide geo-referenced pavement videos, which are processed in two stages. First, potential distresses are identified and located within a real-time rough detection procedure. Based on that, a distributed fine analysis procedure is used to classify and assess specific visual distress patterns. Within the proposed framework, novel methods are created to merge results of both stages in a statistically verified manner to draw conclusions on the classification reliability. In parallel, new concepts for the online learning of distress classifiers are developed to determine dynamically adoptable thresholds that are incrementally updated within the progressing distress assessment procedure.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Koch, until 12/2016