Novel Approach to Pavement Cracking Automatic Detection Based on Segment Extending

Pavement distress detection is the base of highway maintenance. With crack being the main distress in the actual pavement surface, digital image processing has been widely applied to cracking recognition recently. Since most cracks in actual pavement surface images are disconnected and unclear, image processing methods on pixel or connected domain level couldn't identify cracks correctly and entirely. To resolve this problem, a novel cracking automatic detection approach based on segment extending for complex pavement images is proposed. By analyzing the relationship between connected domains, interrelated segments are connected to form a crack and the character of crack direction could be better used in cracking recognition. Actual pavement images are used to verify the performance of this method, and the results show that the surface crack could be identified correctly and automatically.