Asphalt Pavement Transverse Cracking Detection Based on Vehicle Dynamic Response

Transverse cracking is thought of as the typical distress of asphalt pavements. A faster detection technique can provide pavement performance information for maintenance administrations. This paper proposes a novel vehicle-vibration-based method for transverse cracking detection. A theoretical model of a vehicle-cracked pavement vibration system was constructed using the d’Alembert principle. A testing system installed with a vibration sensor was put in and applied to a testing road. Then, parameter optimization of the Short-time Fourier transform (STFT) was conducted. Transverse cracking and normal sections were processed by the optimized STFT algorithm, generating two ideal indicators. The maximum power spectral density and the relative power spectral density, which were extracted from 3D time–frequency maps, performed well. It was found that the power spectral density caused by transverse cracks was above 100 dB/Hz. The power spectral density at normal sections was below 80 dB/Hz. The distribution of the power spectral density for the cracked sections is more discrete than for normal sections. The classification model based on the above two indicators had an accuracy, true positive rate, and false positive rate of 94.96%, 92.86%, and 4.80%, respectively. The proposed vehicle-vibration-based method is capable of accurately detecting pavement transverse cracking.