Automatic Road Condition Assessment by Using Point Laser Sensor

The assessment of road condition periodically is essential to enable road authorities to provide cost-effective and preventative road maintenance. An increasingly popular approach is to use a scanning laser to acquire surface condition data from a vehicle moving at normal traffic speeds. However, due to the high-density of received data such data collection systems usually are designed with off-line processing. This increases the system cost as a large storage device is required and limits the potential application of the approach. In this paper, we present a robust approach for road assessment which uses point lasers that output low-density 1D scanning data from the road surface and can be processed in real-time allied to a low-complexity signal processing algorithm to assess the road condition data. The experimental results indicate that the point laser and proposed concepts together provide a reliable and adequate means of road condition assessment compared with an approach which uses the scanning laser.