Pavement crack detection based on point cloud data and data fusion

The three-dimensional detection in point cloud data for pavement cracks has drawn the attention of many researchers recently. In the field of pavement surface point cloud detection, the key tasks include the identification of pavement cracks and the extraction of the location and size information of pavement cracks. Based on the point cloud data of pavement surface, we developed two methods to directly extract and detect cracks, respectively. The first method is based on the improved sliding window algorithm by combining the random sample consensus (RANSAC) technique to directly extract the crack information from point clouds. The second method is developed based on YOLOv5 to process the two-dimensional images transformed from point cloud data for automatic pavement crack detection. We also attempted to fuse the point cloud images with greyscale images as input for the YOLOv5. Analysis results show that the improved sliding window algorithm efficiently extracts pavement cracks with less noise, and the YOLOv5-based method obtains a good detection of pavement cracks. This article is part of the theme issue 'Artificial intelligence in failure analysis of transportation infrastructure and materials'.