A New Method for Automated Monitoring of Road Pavement Aging Conditions Based on Recurrent Neural Network

The automated monitoring of road pavement conditions is a challenging subject in intelligent transportation. However, the existing studies mostly focus on extracting pavement damages such as cracks, while the pavement aging conditions are still less investigated. In this paper, a novel method based on a modified recurrent neural network is designed for automated monitoring of asphalt pavement aging phenomena from fine-resolution satellite imagery. A spectral augmentation method is proposed to enhance the spectral details of the road pavements. A novel loss function is also proposed to improve the bi-directional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) network in order to better classify different degrees of road pavement aging and non-pavement objects. In order to demonstrate the outperformance of the modified network Bi-GRU+, the Worldview-2 satellite image (16360*7728) covering 16 asphalt roads in the southwestern suburb of Beijing City is used. The results show that the proposed approach has better performance than existing machine learning methods, with an overall accuracy of 98.16% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.97. The overall processing time of the proposed method is 7836 seconds in our case study. The proposed method is efficient for large-scale monitoring of road health conditions from fine-resolution satellite imagery. It can become a part of intelligent transportation and provide a new foundation for large-range automated monitoring of road pavement aging conditions.