A 3D reconstruction-based method using unmanned aerial vehicles for the representation and analysis of road sections

Abstract

Due to the fast growth of cities worldwide, roads are increasing daily, and pavement maintenance has become very heavy and costly. Despite all efforts made under the pavement management system to keep the road surface in good shape, several road sections need to be in better condition, which presents a danger for drivers and pedestrians. This paper proposes a novel pavement 3D reconstruction and segmentation approach using the structure from motion technique, unmanned aerial vehicle, and digital camera. The method consists of the 3D modeling of the road by using images taken from different perspectives and the structure from motion technique. In this method, points cloud is sampled and cleaned using statistical outlier removal and noise filters. After that, duplicated and isolated points are eliminated to retain only significant data. The normal road plane is estimated using the principal component analysis technique and the remaining points. This plan presents a root mean square less than 0.85 cm. Finally, distances from those points to the normal plane are calculated and clustered to segment the road into distressed and non-distressed areas. The proposed approach presents a similarity rate to the survey measurement passed 95%. It has demonstrated promising results and has the potential for further improvement by optimizing various steps.