Automatic pavement crack rating for network-level pavement management system

Abstract

Cracking is one of the important distresses that can be used to trigger pavement maintenance treatments. Traditional crack rating is commonly based on the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) approach involving time-consuming visual inspection and manual classification processes. The emergence of automatic and high-speed laser imaging devices significantly improves the efficiency and productivity of pavement crack data collection but it requires suitablemethods and concepts for automatic crack ratings. This paper discusses the development of an automatic pavement crack rating using crack data collected from a high speed 3D sensor. Two levels of crack ratings are proposed: Level 1 provides detailed crack information including cracking extent, crack types and severity, and Level 2 is a macro-indicator of general/overall cracking extent on a pavement section of 10 m length. The method and concept were developed and tested initially for Singapore expressway network under the effort of the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore to integrate crack data into the pavement management system (PMS).