A low-cost pavement image acquisition system

The paper presents an acquisition system, intended to be used for recording the images of the pavement in front of a vehicle and the geographic position where the images were taken. The main advantages of this system are: easy to deploy in a regular car, low-cost, easy to use acquisition and recording software. The system is based on a cheap and widespread board, Raspberry Pi. It can record images up to 8Mpix, at an average rate of 4 fps, or lower resolution at higher speeds. The position provided by a GPS receiver is also recorded. Supplementary, this system can support a glueless interface with a car vibration acquisition subsystem. The images and the vibration signals are useful for the inspection of the pavement. Alternative solutions (such as a smart phone or image recorders) are not suitable, as they can not record double camera images, nor do they record multiple vibration signals. The presented system was built and tested on real vehicles, in order to validate its properties.