Use of Automated Survey for Surface Cracking Distress Condition in a Pavement Management System

With the advancements in image processing and 3-D technologies, the automated pavement surface condition survey technologies have gained popularity in recent years. However, there are still some issues that have hindered the full acceptance of the automated data collection technologies. This paper presents the research effort of studying the viability of fully automated assessment of pavement distress in a pavement management system (PMS)in terms of the inherent error between the manual and the automated data. Cracking distress data were collected manually and with an automated method at selected sites. The manually surveyed data were compared with the automated distress data to assess the differences.