Spatiotemporal matching method for tracking pavement distress using high-frequency detection data

Various algorithms based on deep learning have achieved promising results in pavement distress detection. However, the detected distresses are not tracked throughout the life cycle. In long-term application scenarios, pavement distresses may take on different forms due to image acquisition mode, distress development, and environmental change, which make tracking distresses a tough question. We present in this study a spatiotemporal matching method based on high-frequency real pavement distress datasets. Pavement distresses of fixed routes were collected 30 times over 5 months, and distresses with spatiotemporal information were obtained at time series. We apply image rectification, stitching and distress class, and bounding box generation algorithms for pre-processing to align the collected images to the same-detail level and angle. A four-step spatiotemporal matching module is designed, including global positioning system (GPS) filtering, class filtering, relative position filtering, and distress feature filtering. The results reveal that the comprehensive rank-3 hit rate of the matching method reaches 88.73%, and the method is robust to environmental factors, which helps show performance decay of distresses and the effect of maintenance operations. It is concluded that the spatiotemporal matching method is convenient to operate, and it lays the foundation for an agency to track distress evolution and make timely treatment of distresses in the life cycle.