Image-Based Approach for Road Profile Analyses
Publication: Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 142, Issue 1
Abstract
Road profile extraction and analysis are essential tasks in transportation asset management. Current approaches use vehicle-borne laser sensors in order to precisely measure the variations in elevation along a specific route. However, a complicated sensor mechanism, such as in the mobile light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system, is involved and the resulting quality is compromised owing to multiple factors. In this study, an image-based approach for extracting road profiles is proposed. It requires only a single camera sensor and a low-cost laser module and is capable of collecting road profiles along both the longitudinal and transverse directions. A detailed methodology is first presented in this paper, followed by a simulation evaluation and a case study. The case study illustrates that the quality of the extracted profiles based on the proposed approach achieves millimeter accuracy. Consequently, an accurate and cost-efficient road profile analysis becomes possible when the proposed approach is implemented.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which significantly improved the quality of the original manuscript. The authors also thank Chien-Tai Lo and Evelyn Perng at the Civil Engineering Department in National Taiwan University for assisting with field data collection. The funding support from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (under contracts No. 103-2622-E-002-036-CC2 and 103-2221-E-002-128-MY2) is gratefully acknowledged.
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Published In
Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 142 • Issue 1 • February 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 26, 2014
Accepted: Sep 28, 2015
Published online: Dec 16, 2015
Published in print: Feb 1, 2016
Discussion open until: May 16, 2016
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