Automated Pavement Distress Detection, Classification and Measurement: A Review

Road surface distress is an unavoidable situation due to age, vehicles overloading, temperature changes, etc. In the beginning, pavement maintenance actions took only place after having too much pavement damage, which leads to costly corrective actions. Therefore, scheduled road surface inspections can extend service life while guaranteeing users security and comfort. Traditional manual and visual inspections don’t meet the nowadays criteria, in addition to a relatively high time volume consumption. Smart City pavement management preventive approach requires accurate and scalable data to deduce significant indicators and plan efficient maintenance programs. However, the quality of data depends on sensors used and conditions during scanning. Many studies focused on different sensors, Machine Learning algorithms and Deep Neural Networks tried to find a sustainable solution. Besides all these studies, pavement distress measurement stills a challenge in Smarts Cities because distress detection is not enough to decide on maintenance actions required. Damages localization, dimensions and future development should be highly detected on real-time. This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art methods and technologies used in recent years in pavement distress detection, classification and measurement. The aim is to evaluate current methods and highlight their limitations, to lay out the blueprint for future researches. PMS (Pavement Management System) in Smarts Cities requires an automated pavement distress monitoring and maintenance with high accuracy for large road networks.