Evaluation of pavement surface drainage using an automated image acquisition and processing system

Abstract Network level evaluation of pavement surface drainage plays a crucial role in the improvement of pavement safety and reducing accident rates. Hydroplaning, as the main considered cause of accidents in wet weather conditions, is a consequence of the low quality draining in the pavement surface. Since no automated system currently exists for the pavement drainage evaluation, this work was conducted to present a new system to assess the quality of the surface drainage process. To this end, an innovative device is presented to simulate the saturation condition of the pavement surface and acquire photos from the drainage process of the pavement surface after saturation. Next, an image processing method was applied to produce proper indices for drainage quality assessment. The preprocessing and enhancement of images was performed using shearlet transform. The rate of surface drainage progress was evaluated by three indices extracted from the images. Finally, pavements were classified into three categories according to the indices extracted for their surface drainage. The validation of the proposed method by the confusion matrix shows the high performance of the system in simulation and assessment of surface drainage of the road pavements.