A Low-Cost Deep Learning System to Characterize Asphalt Surface Deterioration

Every day millions of people travel on highways for work- or leisure-related purposes. Ensuring road safety is thus of paramount importance, and maintaining good-quality road pavements is essential, requiring an effective maintenance policy. The automation of some road pavement maintenance tasks can reduce the time and effort required from experts. This paper proposes a simple system to help speed up road pavement surface inspection and its analysis towards making maintenance decisions. A low-cost video camera mounted on a vehicle was used to capture pavement imagery, which was fed to an automatic crack detection and classification system based on deep neural networks. The system provided two types of output: (i) a cracking percentage per road segment, providing an alert to areas that require attention from the experts; (ii) a segmentation map highlighting which areas of the road pavement surface are affected by cracking. With this data, it became possible to select which maintenance or rehabilitation processes the road pavement required. The system achieved promising results in the analysis of highway pavements, and being automated and having a low processing time, the system is expected to be an effective aid for experts dealing with road pavement maintenance.