Road Surface Quality Assessment Using Polarimetric Airborne SAR

Since the road infrastructure is an important factor for the economy and safety, the continuous monitoring of the road condition is a necessity. Compared to the widely used costly, time consuming and labour-intensive road condition monitoring using measurement vehicles all over the country, the potential of SAR polarimetry to remotely monitor the road surface roughness, cracks and potholes are investigated in this study. The polarimetric analysis of fully polarimetric X-band radar datasets acquired over the Kaufbeuren test site with DLR's airborne sensor F-SAR revealed that the anisotropy and coherency matrix (T3) elements are sensitive to the road surface roughness and can be used to retrieve the vertical surface roughness. The cross-polar sigma nought images show a considerable increase in their magnitude over the cracks and potholes on the road surface. The initial experimental results obtained from this study are discussed in this paper.