Road Surface Condition Monitoring Using Fully Polarimetric Airborne SAR Data

Since the proper maintenance of the road infrastructure has a crucial role in economic development and also on the people’s safety, the periodic monitoring of the road surface quality is a necessity. The widely used method of road surface condition monitoring using measurement vehicles all over the country is costly, labour intensive and time-consuming. The potential of fully polarimetric airborne SAR to remotely monitor the road surface roughness, cracks and potholes are investigated in this study using fully polarimetric X-band SAR datasets acquired with DLR’s F-SAR airborne SAR system. The former military airfield at Kaufbeuren is selected as the test site for this study. The polarimetric analysis 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. Also, the SAR backscatter based empirical models are found to be sensitive to the road surface roughness variations. 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.