Pavement crack characteristic detection based on sparse representation

Pavement crack detection plays an important role in pavement maintaining and management. The threedimensional (3D) pavement crack detection technique based on laser is a recent trend due to its ability of discriminating dark areas, which are not caused by pavement distress such as tire marks, oil spills and shadows. In the field of 3D pavement crack detection, the most important thing is the accurate extraction of cracks in individual pavement profile without destroying pavement profile. So after analyzing the pavement profile signal characteristics and the changeability of pavement crack characteristics, a new method based on the sparse representation is developed to decompose pavement profile signal into a summation of the mainly pavement profile and cracks. Based on the characteristics of the pavement profile signal and crack, the mixed dictionary is constructed with an over-complete exponential function and an over-complete trapezoidal membership function, and the signal is separated by learning in this mixed dictionary with a matching pursuit algorithm. Some experiments were conducted and promising results were obtained, showing that we can detect the pavement crack efficiently and achieve a good separation of crack from pavement profile without destroying pavement profile.