A real-time 3D scanning system for pavement distortion inspection

Pavement distortions, such as rutting and shoving, are the common pavement distress problems that need to be inspected and repaired in a timely manner to ensure ride quality and traffic safety. This paper introduces a real-time, low-cost inspection system devoted to detecting these distress features using high-speed 3D transverse scanning techniques. The detection principle is the dynamic generation and characterization of the 3D pavement profile based on structured light triangulation. To improve the accuracy of the system, a multi-view coplanar scheme is employed in the calibration procedure so that more feature points can be used and distributed across the field of view of the camera. A sub-pixel line extraction method is applied for the laser stripe location, which includes filtering, edge detection and spline interpolation. The pavement transverse profile is then generated from the laser stripe curve and approximated by line segments. The second-order derivatives of the segment endpoints are used to identify the feature points of possible distortions. The system can output the real-time measurements and 3D visualization of rutting and shoving distress in a scanned pavement.