Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) employs the Pavement Management Information System (PMIS) to effectively manage and maintain its highway system. Pavement surface distress is a very important indicator of the condition of the roadway system. To gather this information in urban areas, TxDOT has purchased a multi-purpose road survey vehicle called the Automatic Road Analyzer (ARAN). The data reduction involves a technician who reviews video tapes of the pavement surface recorded by the ARAN. The review technique is a tedious and fatiguing process. Current advancements in dedicated imaging processing hardware enables the development of a computer processing system to reduce the pavement distress data automatically. This report describes two important areas of automatic evaluation of the pavement surface distress video. High resolution, sharp, and shadow free images of the pavement surface enable the computer processing to be more efficient and accurate. To attain this goal, a scheme using artificial light inside an enclosed trailer was investigated. Five types of lights and four types of video cameras were experimented upon in a darkroom and open-bottom trailer to determine the most appropriate combination. The stages of the trailer design up to the final prototype are also described. This report also describes the hardware components of the video image processor system. The selection, justification and configuration of a workstation host image processing system over a PC host system are discussed. Finally, the functionality of individual hardware components and the integration of all components into a comprehensive video image processing system are included in this report.