Intelligent checking system of street surface

The Hanshin Expressway Public Corporation, Osaka, Japan, has been developing and implementing various intelligent sensing system and machine vision and intelligence systems as the most important subsystems of systems such as traffic control systems to utilize the expressway as efficiently as possible and as safely as possible. The Corporation has decided to develop an automatic street surface checking system to improve the overall efficiency and to reduce the cost of checking. This paper reports on the prototype of the system which has been tested and verified for actual implementations. The practical implementation of the system is scheduled to be within the fiscal year 1995. The Corporation is performing the checking with human eyes on a slowly moving car 5 times a week, and if needed, the personnel stops the car and checks the place on foot. This requires skilled personnel and induces traffic congestion because of the low processing speed of the personnel, and at the same time, is fairly dangerous. The algorithms to derive each required checking data from the corresponding sensor signals are proposed, tested and verified. Even at the experimental stage, the detection ratio is high enough for implementation. The sensor signals are processed by an on-board personal computer and stored on a floppy disk and the original image signal is recorded on a video tape recorder. After each checking trip of the vehicle, the floppy and video tape are sent to the office to be stored on the image database in the maintenance information system of the Corporation.