Trr No. 1311 Pavement Design, Management And Performance, pp. 103-111
The collection and analysis of pavement distress data are a primary component af any pavement management system. Different approaches for automaticinterpretation of asphalt pavement distresses, recorded on video or photographic film, with emphasis on segmentation and classification of digitized distress pavement images are examined. Segmentation deals with the problem of extracting the objects of interest from the background, whereas classification assigns distresses to corresponding distress types. Results from the application of the different methods on a data set of asphalt pavement images are presented. Alternative segmentation and classification approaches and the effectiveness of global geometrical descriptors characterizing the various distress classes are evaluated. Issues associated with the accuracy and validity of the proposed methods are discussed and possible sources of error examined. Directions for furthur research are also identified.