Identification of asphalt pavement transverse cracking based on vehicle vibration signal analysis

Transverse cracking is a common distress of semi-rigid asphalt pavement in China. Crack detection offers essential information for pavement performance evaluation and maintenance. A vibration-based method is proposed for transverse cracking identification of asphalt pavement. Vibration signals of the running vehicle at the transverse-cracked sections and the adjacent uncracked sections are measured and preliminarily analysed in time domain. Symlet3 wavelet is used for signal denoising. Frequency domain analysis of signals by fast Fourier transform (FFT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) shows that the occurrence of the transverse crack leads to a dramatic increase of energy in the sensitive frequency band (10∼20 Hz). Considering the computation efficiency, the dual relative energy (DRE) process by FFT and DWT is proposed for crack detection. In addition, the continuous wavelet time-frequency analysis is utilised to locate the transverse cracking precisely. This approach seems promising for the rapid identification of pavement cracks.