AUTOMATED CRACK DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS. PROCEEDINGS, SIXTH CONFERENCE, ROAD ENGINEERING ASSOCIATION OF ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA, 4-10 MARCH 1990, KUALA LUMPUR, VOLUMES 1 TO 5 AND POST CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

The role of pavement management systems (PMS) has been recognised by many countries of the region as a necessary task, both for the control of maintenance works, at project level, and the provision of data for network level planning. The cost of road condition data collection is high and the trend is towards rapid screening followed by more in depth study of those portions of the network requiring it. Research carried out jointly by staff of the University of Birmingham and the Institute of Technology, Bandung, has concentrated on the measurement of the difficult superficial condition parameter, cracking. As a result of this, a procedure has been developed which is able to quantify crack type with respect to density, pattern and indeed width of crack occurring in the road pavement. The procedure involves "photographing" the road surface either onto 35mm film or by way of a CCD video camera, then digitising the image into a 512 by 512 matrix of pixels with given grey levels. The subsequent analysis is fully automated, relying on a set of knowledge based algorithms which are able to produce all the information usually required by an engineer for the entry to a PMS. Examples of its use are given in the paper, together with its accuracy, as well as details of the algorithms which drive the system. For the covering entry of the conference see IRRD 823206. (Author/TRRL)