Pavement Crack Detection Fused HOG and Watershed Algorithm of Range Image

Pavement crack detection plays an important role in pavement maintaining and management. In recent years, pavement crack detection technique based on range image is a recent trend due to its ability of discriminating oil spills and shadows. Existing pavement crack detection methods cannot effectively detect transverse and network cracks, because these methods generally represent the crack geometry feature using single laser scan line, which cannot take the effects of spatial variability, anisotropy and integrity into account. Aiming at the deficiency of existing algorithms, the pavement crack detection method fused histogram of oriented gradient and watershed algorithm is proposed. Firstly, crack edge strength and orientation are detected by histogram of oriented gradient in pavement range image. Then, the traditional watershed algorithm is improved by using the crack edge orientation in order to better extract the crack object. Experiment results show that the proposed method can accurately detect different types of crack objects and identify the severity of crack damage simultaneously.