Estimation of Road Surface Roughness Using Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar

Since road surface roughness is an important factor for road safety, periodic monitoring of the road surface roughness is a necessity. Compared to the widely used costly, time-consuming and labour-intensive road surface roughness estimation using measurement vehicles all over the country, the potential of airborne polarimetric SAR to remotely estimate the road surface roughness is investigated in this study. The analysis of the airborne X-band polarimetric SAR datasets acquired by DLR’s F-SAR system over the Kaufbeuren and Braunschweig test sites revealed that the X-band airborne SAR datasets are sensitive to the road surface roughness. The road surface roughness results estimated using different models are discussed in this paper.