Presentation of a new surface drainage assessment method based on image processing

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

2 RESEARCHER /AUT

Abstract

Improvement of the pavement surface texture characteristics and drainage quality is an important issue in the field of increasing roads safety and reducing the rate of accidents, especially in rainy weather conditions. The assessment of the pavement surface features and their relation with the accident rate is a common research topic, but no extensive research has been carried out on the evaluation of the pavement surface drainage. In this research, a system has been developed to assess the surface drainage of the pavements. For this purpose, hardware is designed which can saturate the surface and capture the drainage process under constant conditions without the effects of environmental factors. The basis of the presented system is based on digital image processing techniques. Using image processing methods, three time-related indexes including Entropy, Energy and pixels proportion have been determined for the assessment of surface drainage quality of the pavements. Providing a proper combination of the indexes, the pavements are classified as appropriate, normal and inappropriate in terms of surface drainage performance using C5.0 data mining algorithm. The validation of the results of the proposed system shows that this system can evaluate the surface drainage situation with 95.7% accuracy. The presented system results can be used in the pavement management systems at project and network levels as a suitable measure for the evaluation of pavement safety in the rainy conditions as well as improving roads safety.

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