Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Pavement
Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Pavement
Research Article
Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Pavement Cracks
Based on 3D Pavement Images
Baoxian Li ,1 Kelvin C. P. Wang,1,2 Allen Zhang ,2 Yue Fei,2 and Giuseppe Sollazzo3
1
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
2
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
3
Department of Engineering, University of Messina Vill. S. Agata, C.da di Dio, 98166 Messina, Italy
Received 19 January 2018; Revised 7 November 2018; Accepted 15 January 2019; Published 18 February 2019
Copyright © 2019 Baoxian Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Pavement cracking is a significant symptom of pavement deterioration and deficiency. Conventional manual inspections of
road condition are gradually replaced by novel automated inspection systems. As a result, a great amount of pavement surface
information is digitized by these systems with a high resolution. With pavement surface data, pavement cracks can be detected
using crack detection algorithms. In this paper, a fully automated algorithm for segmenting and enhancing pavement crack is
proposed, which consists of four major procedures. First, a preprocessing procedure is employed to remove spurious noise and
rectify the original 3D pavement data. Second, crack saliency maps are segmented from 3D pavement data using steerable matched
filter bank. Third, 2D tensor voting is applied to crack saliency maps to achieve better curve continuity of crack structure and higher
accuracy. Finally, postprocessing procedures are used to remove redundant noises. The proposed procedures were evaluated over
200 asphalt pavement images with diverse cracks. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method showed a high
performance and could achieve average precision of 88.38%, recall of 93.15%, and F-measure of 90.68%, respectively. Accordingly,
the proposed approach can be helpful in automated pavement condition assessment.
Figure 1: The 2D pavement image (left) and 3D pavement image (right): the up green line is the transverse profile of a patch of pavement
surface.
Figure 2: PaveVision3D Ultra System (left) and representative 3D pavement data (right).
(3) The depth information collected by 3D techniques is frequency subbands. Unfortunately, those approaches have
more helpful in analyzing cracks, textures, rutting, etc. [10– limitations in detecting discontinuous or high-curvature
12]. cracks. Currently, there are some successful applications
Due to recent developments and innovations in hardware of machine learning techniques, such as Artificial Neural
devices, laser line-scanning based techniques tend to become Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), in
mature enough for high-resolution 3D pavement data collec- classifying cracks on pavement surface [24].
tion. Laurent et al. [13] developed a Laser Crack Measurement In rest of this paper, firstly, the proposed method is
System (LCMS) composed of two laser profilers to acquire explained in detail. Secondly, an image library of 200 pave-
high-resolution 3D road surface data. Moreno et al. [14] ment 3D data verifies the accuracy and effectiveness of the
proposed an electric vehicle equipped with a laser scanner proposed method. Lastly, discussion and conclusions are
to achieve high density of surveyed points. Furthermore, given, respectively.
the PaveVision3D System mounted on Digital Highway Data
Vehicle (DHDV) (Figure 2) is able to obtain full-lane-scale 2. Methodology
3D data in 1-mm resolution at a highway speed up to 100 km/h
no matter during night- or day-time [15, 16]. In this paper, all the testing and validation data are 3D
Although automation in pavement data collection has pavement images collected by PaveVision3D System. Each 3D
achieved remarkable progress, automated distress detection image in size of 2048 × 4096 is able to cover roughly 2 ×
still faces great challenge due to the complexity and diversity 4 m2 surface area with 1 mm resolution. As shown in Figure 3,
of pavement surfaces [17, 18]. As a major task of distress the proposed method represents the following procedures:
survey, automated crack detection has been studied for a long (1) Preprocessing techniques are utilized to remove noises
time. Intensity-thresholding methods have been proposed and to rectify pavement data. (2) Steerable Matched Filter
to transform the pavement images into a binary domain Bank (SMFB) is applied on 3D pavement data for segmenting
such that the pavement distresses are easier to be recognized crack saliency maps. (3) 2D Tensor Voting is used to enhance
[19, 20]. However, those methods fail to handle images the crack continuity based on the crack saliency maps. (4)
with unevenly distributed illuminance. Edge detection based Postprocessing is conducted to remove false-positive errors.
methods, such as morphological filters [21] and BEMD
[22], are also introduced for pavement crack detection. 2.1. Spurious Noise Removal and 3D Pavement Data Rectifica-
Nevertheless, those methods tend to generate discontinuous tion. 3D pavement data may have noises caused by invalid
or nonintegral cracks. Wavelet-based approaches [23] have laser points and vehicle vibration or movement. Therefore,
been utilized to decompose the original data into different spurious noises removal and pavement 3D data rectification
Journal of Advanced Transportation 3
are needed at the first stage. A typical 2D Gaussian filter with In this case, the size of the filter is 3 × 3, and 𝜎 is
standard deviation 𝜎 is used for noise removal. Equation (1) equal to 2. In order to determine the presence of a spurious
gives each value of the 2D Gaussian filter at position 𝑝0 = noise at each point (𝑥, 𝑦), the following criterion is conduct-
(𝑥, 𝑦). ed:
1 −(x2 +𝑦2 )/2𝜎2
𝑔 (p0 ; 𝜎) = 𝑒 (1)
√2𝜋𝜎
{𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) 𝑖𝑓 𝑎𝑏𝑠 [𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) − 𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦)] > 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑠
𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) = { (2)
𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒
{
where 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒(𝑥, 𝑦) is the original pixel value at the point 𝑓(𝜎, 𝜃), where 𝜃 ∈ [−𝜋/2, 𝜋/2] is the orientation of the
(𝑥, 𝑦), 𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒(𝑥, 𝑦) is the filtered pixel value at the point filter:
(𝑥, 𝑦), and thres is a given threshold. 2 2 2
After obtaining 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦), another big-size 2D Gaus- (𝑥2 − 𝜎2 ) 𝑒−(𝑥 +𝑦 )/2𝜎
𝑔𝑥𝑥 (𝑥, 𝑦) =
sian filter is applied to smooth the entire image. In this √2𝜋𝜎5
case, the filter size is 101 × 101, and 𝜎 is equal to 80. Let 2 2 2
𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) be the convolved images based on 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦); (𝑦2 − 𝜎2 ) 𝑒−(𝑥 +𝑦 )/2𝜎
𝑔𝑦𝑦 (𝑥, 𝑦) = (4)
then the rectified image will be √2𝜋𝜎5
2 2 2
𝑅𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) = 𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) − 𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 (𝑥, 𝑦) (3) 𝑥𝑦𝑒−(𝑥 +𝑦 )/2𝜎
𝑔𝑥𝑦 (𝑥, 𝑦) = 𝑔𝑦𝑥 (𝑥, 𝑦) =
√2𝜋𝜎5
where 𝑅𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 is the rectified pixel value at the point 𝑓 (𝜎, 𝜃) = 𝑔𝑥𝑥 cos2 𝜃 + 2𝑔𝑥𝑦 cos 𝜃 sin 𝜃 + 𝑔𝑦𝑦 sin2 𝜃 (5)
(x, y); 𝐹𝑉𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 is the convolved pixel value at the point
(x, y). A filter bank is generated by using Steerable Matched
Figure 4 shows sample profiles in both transverse and Filter, namely SMFB. Table 1 lists 52 components of SMFB
longitudinal directions. The top images (a) and (b) show the with different parameters, filter size, 𝜎, and 𝜃. Four different
original pavement profile. The bottom images (c) and (d) 𝜎 are assigned to consider the varying widths of cracks. The
illustrate rectified profiles based on (3). The red lines are their orientations are incremented with a fix angle interval 15∘ to
smoothed profile. capture crack segments in varying orientations. In order to
yield nearly zero responses within noncrack area, the filters
are shifted to have a zero mean. All filters in SMFB are
2.2. Steerable Matched Filter Bank (SMFB). The steerable illustrated in Figure 5.
filter introduced by Freeman and Adelson [25] is a linear Each preprocessed 3D pavement image is convolved with
combination of a few basic filters. Particularly, steerable all 52 filters in SMFB. At each pixel, only the maximum
filter is popular in crack and ridge detection due to high convolutional response is preserved as a result of SMFB
efficiency [26–28]. In this study, the SMFB method uses operation. Mathematically, (6)∼(8) give the specific calcula-
second-derivative Gaussians as basic filters. Equation (1) gives tion procedures.
the 2D Gaussian with variance 𝜎, and (4) gives its second
derivatives. Equation (5) shows the formulation of the filter 𝑟𝑖 (𝑝; 𝜎, 𝜃) = 𝑘𝑖 (𝜎, 𝜃) ⊗ 𝑉 (𝑝) (6)
4 Journal of Advanced Transportation
450 460
440 440
430 420
420 400
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 200 400 600 800 1000
(a) (b)
20 20
10 10
0 0
−10 −10
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 200 400 600 800 1000
(c) (d)
Figure 4: Examples of pavement 3D data rectification: (a) and (b) the original transverse profile and longitudinal profile; (c) and (d) the
corresponding transverse profile and longitudinal profile.
=3 =7
=5 =9
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Original pavement 3D image Crack saliency map
−16 (𝜎 − 1) log (0.1) Figure 7: Votes cast by a stick tensor at the origin O.
𝑐= (11)
𝜋2
As TV is used to enhance connections between crack
fragments in this paper, after the stick voting stage, the dense [33]. Lastly, the OR operation is executed on the dense tensor
tensor map is extracted as tensor voting result, which is map and the crack saliency map. An overall illustration of our
different from the original tensor voting method presented in method is shown in Figure 8.
6 Journal of Advanced Transportation
Encode
Tensor voting
Tensor voting
1 1
0.8 0.8
0.6 0.6
0.4 0.4
0.2 0.2
0 0
(a) (b)
1 1
0.8 0.8
0.6 0.6
0.4 0.4
0.2 0.2
0 0
(c) (d)