Metrological performance and correlation analysis of areal surface texture parameters for concrete surface characterization by laser scanning

Reliable quantification of concrete surface roughness is essential for engineering design and quality control, as it directly affects structural mechanical performance and durability. ISO 25178-2:2021 provides a rich set of areal surface texture parameters, yet their metrological performance and mutual correlations on concrete surfaces measured by laser scanning have not been systematically evaluated. As a result, parameter selection remains largely empirical, and the reliability, applicability, and comparability of the chosen parameters remain unverified. To address this gap, this study proposes a parameter-evaluation framework that combines multidimensional metrological assessment with correlation analysis. To this end, six hydrodemolished C40 concrete slabs were prepared, providing twelve analysis regions of differing roughness, each scanned ten times at a 0.3 mm point spacing with a handheld 3D laser scanner. On this dataset, 79 parameters were first assessed along three dimensions—measurement repeatability, discrimination reliability, and point-spacing sensitivity. The results showed that field parameters markedly outperformed feature parameters, with 78.6% versus 13.7% passing all three. The 55 parameters passing the discrimination-reliability screening were then grouped by average-linkage hierarchical clustering of the Spearman correlation coefficient into 20 clusters at a distance cutoff of 0.10, revealing that strong correlations frequently span different parameter categories. By jointly considering metrological performance and intra-cluster representativeness, a set of 20 relatively independent recommended parameters was obtained. By establishing each parameter’s performance and relative ranking across the three dimensions, the framework provides a basis for parameter selection and measurement-scheme design in concrete surface characterization, for both engineering inspection and academic research.