Acquisizione, elaborazione ed analisi spaziale di immagini per la gestione del degrado delle pavimentazioni stradalI

Road maintenance is till today, in many cases, left to improvisation. It is often performed when the pavement has been damaged, through interventions and repairing times based upon previous experience or consolidated practice. The continuous increase in road traffic and stresses on the pavements, the necessity to ensure high safety levels and, moreover, the reduction of the available funds for the Public Administrations impose different and innovative managerial choices. Therefore, repair works need to be planned and executed with the best quality-cost rate, in the shortest time possible and with the smallest discomfort to road users. The automatic survey technique represents the only possible solution to carry out a modern and efficient Pavement Management System (PMS). The paper describes a research which defines a systematic method for the analysis and the study of the image acquisition and processing techniques useful to develop a non-destructive automatic system for the maintenance state survey of the pavement and for the management of the optimum interventions in a GIS. Once defined the procedure to use for image acquisition, the processing was made through operations of segmentation, extraction and classification. After reclassifying the image and vectorializing the cracks, was estimated the entity of the damage. Furthermore, it was verified how spatial resolution and brightness are fundamental factors for a correct implementation of the entire system. The ArcGIS proves to be the most suitable support to integrate all the procedures used for imaging elaboration and spatial analysis. This software presents user-friendly interfaces and provides efficient visualizations of surveyed results, not only for the use of transportation engineers (engaged in maintenance management), but also for Road Administrators.