LiDAR-Based Automatic Pavement Distress Detection and Management Using Deep Learning and BIM

Due to the progress in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, the collection of road point cloud data containing depth information and spatial coordinates has become more accessible. Consequently, utilizing point cloud data for pavement distress detection and quantification emerges as a crucial approach to improving the precision and reliability of road maintenance procedures. This paper aims to automatically detect and visualize pavement distress using LiDAR, deep learning-based 3D object detection method, and building information modeling (BIM). A pavement distress data set is first established using the point cloud data obtained from LiDAR. Then, the 3D object detection network, namely PointPillar, is employed for pavement distress detection, and the detection results will be quantified at a region-level. Finally, pavement BIM model integrating parametrically modeled distress families is built to visually manage the detected distress. After training and validating the model with the pavement distress data set, a detection performance index of recall is 78.5%, mean average precision (mAP) is 62.7%, which is better than other compared point cloud-based methods though the detection performance can be further improved. In addition, a newly untrained section of road is applied for the experiment. The detected distress is integrated in BIM environment for a visual management, providing a better maintenance guidance.