A Pavement Crack Detection Method Combining 2D with 3D Information Based on Dempster-Shafer Theory

Pavement cracking is one of the main distresses presented in the road surface. Objective and accurate detection or evaluation for these cracks is an important task in the pavement maintenance and management. In this work, a new pavement crack detection method is proposed by combining two-dimensional (2D) gray-scale images and three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning data based on Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory. In this proposed method, 2D gray-scale image and 3D laser scanning data are modeled as a mass function in evidence theory, and 2D and 3D detection results for pavement cracks are fused at decision-making level. The experimental results show that the proposed method takes advantage of the respective merits of 2D images and 3D laser scanning data and therefore improves the pavement crack detection accuracy and reduces recognition error rate compared to 2D image intensity-based methods.