Framework for network-level pavement condition assessment using remote sensing data mining

Pavement condition monitoring is fundamental for the efficient allocation of resources in transportation asset management. However, data collection involves laborious and costly procedures. Our study intends to investigate the usage of remote sensing data for network-level pavement condition assessment that offers a more cost-effective alternative and a rapid infrastructure assessment tool that can be used in the aftermath of natural disasters. Based on an extensive literature review, a data mining framework was established to train models that predict the pavement condition of different road segments. The framework exploits the inherent information of multispectral images by generating spectral related attributes. To identify pavement sampling areas, an automated procedure using image segmentation replaces manual surface digitizing. Unlike previous research, different classification models were used to approximate the mapping function from spectral information to pavement conditions. A preliminary case study was conducted with data provided by the City of Dallas and multispectral images acquired from the Texas Natural Resources Information System. The mean-shift segmentation algorithm was used to locate noise introducing areas on the pavement surface. Four different classification models were trained using k-nearest neighbors, naive Bayes, support vector machines, and a multilayer perceptron. The developed models were employed to predict the road surface condition class of a test set not included in the training procedure. The multilayer perceptron presented the highest accuracy level of 71%, showing that the framework might have the potential for future implementation.